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In defense of “prose”; and, Concrete flag

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In defense of “prose”; and, Concrete flag

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Content In Defense of “Prose”
and
Concrete Flag
by
Alfred Brown IV
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
LITERATURE AND CREATIVE WRITING
December 2020
Copyright 2020 Alfred Brown IV
And, therefore, though he recount things not true, yet because he telleth
them not for true he lieth not
-Sir Philip Sidney, A Defence of Poesie !ii
Because of Jacqueline Eleanor Brown
!iii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to humbly and publicly offer my sincere gratitude to the University of
Southern California, the Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, and especially its
Program in Literature and Creative Writing for the faith, support, and opportunity they have
afforded me. I offer, too, my utmost appreciation to my dissertation committee, which includes
Professors Emily Anderson, Percival Everett, Tim Gustafson, and Elyn Saks. Further, without the
care, guidance, and unerring encouragement of my advisor, Professor Aimee Bender, none of this
would have been (even remotely) possible. The same is true of Creative Writing Graduate
Coordinator Janalynn Bliss, whose generosity of time and affection has guided me through
nearly a decade of my life. I remain in awe of the selfless support I have received from these and
other mentors along the way, and hope that my work reflects adroitly the curious pursuit they
have encouraged.
!iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Epigraph……………………………………………………………………………….…………..ii
Dedication…………………………………………………………………………….…………..iii
Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………………….iv
List of Figures ………………………………………………………………..………………..…vi
Abstract…………….…………………………………………………………………………….vii
In Defense of Prose (Critical Dissertation)
1) Sometimes the shit stays messy………………………………………………………………..1
2) A cloud in trousers…………………………………………………………………………….12
3) Something beyond the phenomenal…………………….……………………………………..25
4) that Rambling, Inconsistent Creature…………………………………………………………33
5) a sort of lightning rod for an accumulation of atmospheric disturbances…………………….48
6) Simply an unconventional, generally melancholy though sometimes even playful now-ending
read………………………………………………………………………………………64
7) Grocery Shopping in Kayenta………………………………………………………….……..75
8) It’s called art, dickhead………………………………………………………………………..89
Concrete Flag (Creative Dissertation)…………………………………………………………..99
Bibliography.….………………………………………………………………………………..238
Further Reading……….………………………………………………………………………..245
LIST OF FIGURES
1. The Catcher in the Rye paperback cover………..……………………………………….13
2. The Catcher in the Rye paperback backcover……………………………………………13
3. The Catcher in the Rye paperback spine…………………………………………………14
4. Trystero symbol under the Williamsburg Bridge…………………….…..………………15
5. “My Wife and My Mother-in-Law” by W.E. Hill………………………………………..29
6. Engraving of the pillory. Source: William Dwight Whitney. The Century Dictionary and
Cyclopedia: An encyclopedic Lexicon of the English Language (New York, NY: The
Century Co., 1889)……………………………………………………………………….43
7. Bashas’ Diné supermarket in Kayenta, Arizona………………….…..……….…………75
8. Blue Bird Flour………………………………………………………..…………………76
9. Snow cone syrup…………………………………………………………………………76
10. Monument Valley, Utah………………………………………………………………….79
11. Cittá Nuova by Antonio Sant’Elia………………………….…………………………..106
12. Magic Eye dinosaurs (https://i.redd.it/evukiwalgv111.png)............................................126
13. El Segundo, CA. “WEiRD HAROLD -74-”……………………………………………129
14. James Tilly Matthews. “Air Loom.” (wellcomecollection.org/works/p6q8g27q)...........133
15. III, IV , Grandma Jack, park……………………………………………………………..138
16. My diary circa 1991.……………………………………………………………………140
17. Bloomingdale Asylum for the Insane. By A. Dick and H. Fossette.1831 (https://
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/
File:Bloomingdale_Insane_Asylum,_Manhattanville,_New_York.jpg).........................151
18. Wedding. Philadelphia. 1986….………………………………………………………..154
19. Trystero rendering. Author render..…………………………………………………..…155
20. Trystero under Williamsburg Bridge. By Author.………………………………………156
21. “The transfer of wounded Italian soldiers after the bombing of Monfalcone.” By Ugo
Ojetti. 1916.(https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/the-transfer-of-wounded-italian-
soldiers-after-the-bombing-of-monfalcone/bAFLTC44W4QGYQ)................................165
22. My baptism.
1983……………………………………………………………………………………..172
23. Handprints. Redondo Beach. Circa 1984.………………………………………………178
24. The Air Loom, A Human Influencing Machine. By Rod Dickinson. (http://
www.theairloom.org)………………………………………………...............................182
25. ATHAS STOMPER….……………………………………………………………………. 205
26. Robert Goodman, Attorney-at-Law.……………………………………………………207
27. Jacqueline E. Brown…..………………………………………………………………..209
28. 2
nd
edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dark Sun Boxed Set…………………210
29. Work order for ATHAS STOMPER………….…………………………………………….217
30. Leés-Athas city limits.………………………………………………………………….222
31. Bulletin board, Athas.…………………………………………………………………..225
32. Jean Bourdaa’s clothing line.……………………………….……………………..……230
33. Jacqueline E. Brown, headstone.……………………………………………………….233 !vi
ABSTRACT
In an age characterized by increasingly stark social divisions, this dissertation suggests
that the rigid distinction between fiction and non-fiction that persists in contemporary English
literature parallels the bipolarity of other cultural institutions, like race, gender, sexuality, and
political persuasion. By surveying a cadre of books that do not readily conform to extant
definitions on either end of the (non-)fictional spectrum, a new estuarial form begins to emerge
that swims freely between the poles. Authors discussed include Sophie Calle, W.G. Sebald, Ben
Lerner, David Markson, Amy Hempel, and John D’Agata, whose work is considered through the
lens of “not-knowing,” a method of literary composition described first by Donald Barthelme.
Significant consideration is given both to writing and reading within this “estuary,” and is
underpinned by an analysis that casts Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe as the antecedent to the
limbo of contemporary literature. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that only an uninflected,
purposely ambiguous, and aesthetically-oriented term like “prose” is capable of describing and
preserving the fluidity of these texts. The proliferation of this terminology will not only
encourage authors to disregard antiquated modes of creation hemmed in by questions of
verisimilitude and veracity, it will also corroborate other cultural spectrums (gender, race, etc.)
currently poised to replace our toxic polarity with a much-needed fluidity.
!vii
1) Sometimes the shit stays messy
DISCUSSED: Scantrons, the “one-drop rule,” America’ s first biracial chief executive,
binarism, our pathological insistence on the (non-)fiction divide, estuarial literature, the
Age of Flexibility, “prose.”
The first time I was forced to choose between black and white I was eight-years-old. This
was in Mrs. Ragragola’s third grade classroom at Grandview Elementary School in Manhattan
Beach, California. If I am careful, I can still close my eyes and smell the smell we called cooties
that hounded my seat partner, Matt S., for years. It was late spring and in the quiet of
midmorning you could faintly hear a southern swell pounding waves onto the shore a few blocks
to the west. It was that part of the year just past Spring Break where seconds take minutes to pass
and summer vacation seems like it will never arrive no matter how much the weather beckons. I
vividly remember even now—perhaps because it punctuated such a humdrum season in a small
boy’s life, during the mind-numbing rigmarole of statewide standardized testing, a robotic
cassette tape recording guiding us through each turn of the page—how suddenly I faltered when,
after some other trivial housekeeping requests, the instructions implored me to select my
ethnicity. I was always loathe to raise my hand, and only did so when confronted with this
demand sheepishly and with considerable confusion.
“Can I pick more than one?” I whispered secretly to my elderly teacher, her very pink
lipstick in joyful contrast with skin darkly tanned from a youth growing up in the Philippines.
She smiled cautiously in return, and leaned down onto my desk, her eyes reading over the
instructions that forbade me from bubbling-in more than one circle on my Scantron. “Hmm,”
said Mrs. Ragragola, no doubt rifling through a spate of answers she knew were all insufficient.
!1
The rest of my classmates glanced at me, wondering what I could possibly be having trouble
with since the real questions hadn’t yet started. “Just pick the one you think matches you the
best, Alfred,” she said, patting me on the back as she returned gingerly to the front of the class.
I am far from the first biracial millennial to describe this troubling practice. For so many
of us, the one-bubble technical limitations of those early Scantrons required us to play a game of
favorites we weren’t ever meant to play. We were forced to officially deny our true, manifold
identity, as if half (or more) of our genetics were irrelevant, insignificant, or worse—subordinate.
We had no choice in the matter of being born both white and (black, brown, etc.) but were made
at a tender age to pit them against one another, to anoint one supremacy over the other, to “pick
the one that matched us the best.” It felt like trying to choose which parent you’d rather die. Like
one half of me stabbing the other half in the back. So much so that, in defiance, I habitually left
this question blank. Or sometimes filled-in all of the bubbles at once. I was trying, even at eight-
years-old, to make a point. I was trying to suggest that a life spent at the poles was disingenuous.
I was arguing for “both.” For “and.” Arguing against the tyranny of “one or the other.”
This sort of all-or-nothing, one-size-fits-all, this-or-that approach wasn’t then, nor is it
now, limited to standardized testing. But viewed through the lens of race, it is easy to illustrate
the gravitational allure binary systems have in Western culture. My Scantron questionnaire had
antecedents in “a peculiarly American institution known informally as ‘the one-drop rule,’ which
defines as black a person with as little as a single drop of ‘black blood’” (Wright). This
institutionalized, racist practice led to many of the horrors we associate with slavery, Jim Crow,
and the prejudiced laws that still pervade the frayed fabric of these delicately United States. And
even while this ignorant purity test clearly “derives from a long discredited belief that each race
!2
had its own blood type, which was correlated with physical appearance and social
behavior,” (Wright), the “one-drop rule” reflects more than a systemic racism. It reflects a culture
nervous to deal head-on with nuance. A culture unwilling to explore the complexity of issues as
thorny as race.
As in: I can still remember the hopeful enthusiasm I maintained during Barack Obama’s
inaugural campaign. To see a man of any color garner so much support and vie so successfully
for America’s top office seemed inconceivable. That he was biracial like me felt even more
surreal, as if the covertly discriminative (Scantron, et al.) structures that had caused so much
confusion in my own life were finally being abandoned in a wave of “hope and change.” The rise
of Obama to prominence bolstered my naive hope that our national conversation on race had
fully matured, and that our collective approach to race had changed to include the full, motley
spectrum of identities we enjoyed. Instead, I was met with a well-intentioned New York Times
lead article that belied our stubborn addiction to all-or-nothing, “one-drop” binarism, no matter
how nuanced the story: “Barack Hussein Obama was elected the 44th president of the United
States on Tuesday, sweeping away the last racial barrier in American politics with ease as the
country chose him as its first black chief executive” (Nagourney).
Statements like these do not at all begin to appreciate the complex spectrum of human
demography that constitutes our increasingly blended society. By ignoring Obama’s caucasian
mother and pinning his ethnicity, identity, and presidential bid (at least in part) on the genetics of
a (mostly) absentee father, this rhetoric diminishes the conversation on race by exploiting an
antiquated notion overly dependent on observable phenotype. Productive conversations that
intersect race honestly with history, culture, class, semiotics, ideology, geography, education—
!3
these are all muted if not silenced altogether. Rather than dismantle the “last racial barrier[s]” we
abide, it is just this type of obtuse observation that gilds our implicit racism with progressive,
often altruistic language and refuses to acknowledge the far more messy truths that characterize a
world permanently altered by centuries of colonialism, immigration, and globalization.
Obama was not America’s “first black chief executive,” though it is a far simpler thing to
say than that he was America’s “first biracial chief executive.” That term—“biracial”— is
difficult, troubling, thorny because it intimates both the inhumanity of America’s longstanding
racist foundations and the beautiful spectrum of human ethnicity that some of racism’s most
staggering horrors have inevitably precipitated. “Biracial” is an ambiguous umbrella term that
resists generalization and beckons for further inquiry, an additional step at odds with the mass-
marketing of an upstart, populist candidate to an electorate with the attention span of a stubborn
puppy. Disregarding the whole truth of Obama’s ethnicity may very have well played into a
political strategy that gave increased agency and urgency to an electorate eager to “rewrite” the
history books. But so doing played to our dominant inclination to oversimplify our world into the
type of stark contrasts that retards true, qualitative progress.
The impulse to code our world in binary terms is, of course, not limited to race and
ethnicity. We see this glaringly in the struggle for modern American politics to fit a diverse set of
ideologies into an increasingly antiquated two-party system of governance. We see this is in the
failure of but two traditional pronouns to keep pace with gender fluidity. Between “gay” and
“straight,” our sexual identities now span an ever-growing LGBTQA acronym. Increasingly, we
are sustained by the tensions that prop up our antonymic allegiances. Liberal versus
Conservative. Man versus Woman. Vegan versus Carnivore. Rent versus Own. Digital versus
!4
Analog. Open versus Monogamous. Us versus Them. Right versus Wrong. In the melting pot of
an increasingly diverse world suffering from an overwhelming case of choice paralysis and
information overload, polarizing our identities has given us a way to maintain them, even when
those poles may no longer reflect the nuance of our true character. While race is a glaring,
convenient example of our dependence on polarity, it is but one symptom of a larger, systemic
malady.
One argument is that all binary systems are inherently violent. That is, reductive by
definition and destructive in practice. By emphasizing polarity so vehemently, binary systems
neuter/disappear/gut/dispose/marginalize the beautiful, infinite spectrum of possibilities that
characterizes the in-between. And while binary systems certainly streamline choice-making, this
(over)simplification comes at a steep cost. The subtle details of gradation are lost to stark
contrast. The clarity gained by blatant contradiction destroys the possibility of diversity,
idiosyncrasy, invention, novelty, and quorum.
Something seemingly as innocuous as literature’s binary manner of codifying prose into
distinct “fiction” and “non-fiction” silos actually poses a much larger threat to our culture than it
may seem. In the first place, the practice is a sort of gateway drug which lends subtle credence to
the practice and viability of binarism writ large. If our storytelling can be described by just two
overarching categories, why not our race? Why not our gender? Binary systems act in cahoots,
one symbiotically corroborating the problematic, reductive logic of the others. So that if we take
for granted that our literature is either (wholly) fact or fiction, we are more likely to require a
polarized world where only black and white (he and she, Democrat and Republican, gay and
!5
straight, Christian and Muslim, fake news and propaganda, Coke and Pepsi, right and wrong,
etc.) exist. One erroneous binary begets the next.
But our pathological insistence on the (non-)fiction divide does additional damage. It also
robs us of a safe and necessary space in which to practice the sort of confusion that would equip
us with a temperament better suited to our new and increasingly fluid cultural reality. Of course,
poles are essential. They help demarcate the outer boundaries between which any art flourishes,
and separate one medium from the next. In prose literature, those poles seek to delineate between
invention of (fiction) and fidelity to (non-fiction) reality. This distinction has been important
during the post-Gutenberg development of Western literature in identifying dominant modes of
storytelling. But by continuing to categorize our prose in such a blunt manner, we conscript the
writer to weary, well-trod modalities and confine the reader to familiar stakes.
Regardless of content, the process of reading either mode yields diminishing value the
more we take its precept for granted. Ben Marcus, in a caustic essay that thoughtfully derides
Jonathan Franzen and the realist approach to novel making, argues that “literary language can
also make a more abstract but no less vital entertainment—subtle, unfamiliar, less wedded to
preapproved modes, but exhilarating nevertheless” (39). In this paradigm, our literature could
(should) act as a laboratory. It could (should) provide us opportunities to test our tired
assumptions, poke black holes in our expectations, and experiment more radically with form,
content, and modality. By contradicting “preapproved modes,” our literature could (should) set
an example for transgressing other stale cultural institutions. If our books swim out into the
estuary between fact and fiction, we shouldn’t revert them to the swift current of either the one or
the other out of habit and/or convenience and/or marketing strategies. We should encourage them
!6
to languish between and confound us, confuse us, and force us to reckon with an experience that
is truly novel.
Luckily, this estuarial literature is vibrant and thriving. I am speaking of books by David
Markson. I am speaking of books by W.G. Sebald. I am speaking of writers like Amy Hempel
and Lydia Davis and Enrique Vila-Matas and Maggie Nelson. I’m wondering, still, after many
years, what exactly to do with books by Sophie Calle, and Ben Lerner, and John D’Agata. I
could go on. And on. We are graduating now from an age that the writer/scholar David Shields
has suggested suffered from a “reality hunger” to one that seems more thirsty for fluidity. The
traditional definitions of (non-)fiction do not apply to these writers. More importantly, they have
each in their own way created work that resists the temptation even to deal in those terms in the
first place, regardless of what may be stamped on their book jacket or where they may be shelved
in the bookstore. These are amphibious works. They are content to stay forever in the estuary. As
Nelson rightly argues, “So long as we exalt artists as beautiful liars or as the world’s most
profound truth tellers, we remain locked in a moralistic paradigm that doesn't even began to
engage art’s most exciting provinces” (The Art of Cruelty 139).
In other words, the writer’s task is to reject a polar, antonymic, one-drop conception of
her art form. Because a work of non-fiction takes the liberty to nudge facts around doesn’t mean
it should be understood as “fiction.” In fact, this confusion may be—and often is—central to our
(mis)understanding of the book. Confusion and misunderstanding may, in fact, be an intended
consequence squandered by demanding allegiance to one mode or the other. Only by freeing
ourselves of the categorical limitations we bring to writing and the habitual anticipations we
bring to reading at our (non-)fictional poles can books even hope to achieve these “most exciting
!7
provinces.” The postmodern writer Donald Barthelme was famously adamant that “art is not
difficult because it wishes to be difficult, but because it wishes to be art” (“Not-Knowing” 15).
He posited that it was only by wading purposefully into (sometimes utter) confusion—“not-
knowing,” he called it—that art was even possible. This, I think, is true of both writer and reader.
We must both create and consume our literature in less stable states if it is to explore the
uncharted. Precedent, template, rules, and traditional methods of categorization are antithetical to
these estuarial books, all of which pursue new literary territory by negating, inverting, and/or
ignoring a well-established writer/reader contract that has subconsciously coddled/jailed readers
for centuries.
Which is not to suggest that generic crises are a new phenomenon. Plato, Aristotle, Sir
Philip Sidney, Roland Barthes (etc.) all famously wrestled with the function and shortcomings of
storytelling within the larger fabric of culture. And with the invention of the printed book and
radical expansion of literacy after Gutenberg’s press, humans all across the globe began a
tenuous, often volatile relationship to the new codex technology which continues to be refined to
this day. The anxieties that plagued early English writers and readers who had yet to fully
solidify even by the early 18
th
century how to perform their respective tasks can be seen in our
earliest English novels, like Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and the tracts that were critical of
its success. The arguments that arose between Defoe and his detractors depict literature as a
fledgling art form that was as unsure then about the rules of engagement as it is today. “[T]here
will come an Age, when the Minds of Men shall be more flexible,” wrote Defoe to a critic intent
on outing him as a romantic and a charlatan, “when the Prejudices of their Fathers shall have no
Place” (243).
!8
Maybe I’m arguing that that Age is now.
That after many centuries, the Age of Flexibility has finally arrived.
To write an essay renouncing the two-party system of literature is a necessary step in
ensuring that the “Minds of Men shall be more flexible.” While it may seem much ado about
nothing to niggle over generic terms, I think we are long overdue a fundamental shift in how we
approach the writing, reading, and criticism of our literature. There is no other art form that
segregates its works primarily based on its purported fidelity to lived events (as if that were even
possible in the first place). Music, painting, dance, photography, sculpture, architecture, culinary
arts—these are all categorized based on their aesthetic/phenomenological qualities rather than
their relationship to some slippery notion of “truth.” We do not speak of “non-fictional music”
but, rather, rock or pop. We speak of Abstract Expressionism, not “fictional” painting. The same
is true even of that other major branch of literature—poetry. There is no “non-fictional poetry.”
No separate shelf for “fictive verse.” From that literary discipline, and its practitioners, I think
prose might learn a thing or two about eroding boundaries already too porous to demand our full
respect. Namely, the unmistakable magnetism created by work that wades unencumbered into the
estuary, declaring allegiance only unto its own internal logic, thwarting and encouraging active
participation in creating, extending, and modifying the lore of its own creation. “How to explain,
in a culture frantic for resolution, that sometimes the shit stays messy?” wonders Nelson. “How
to explain that for some, or for some at some times, this irresolution is OK—desirable
even” (53).
I am writing in defense of messy. I am writing in defense of irresolution. In defense of
androgyny, ambidexterity, ambiguity. I am writing in defense of “prose.” It is the only term broad
!9
enough to return fluidity to a desiccated literature buckling under the weight of its own stubborn
rigidity. This is not to say that work can’t be created at those other heavily-trafficked polar
extremes. Only that we must now also make room for a literature that does not undermine its
own endeavor by extending a dubious legalese contract even before we have read its first page.
And we must create a space for literary artists to bend and flex the form without the handicap of
explicit, claustrophobic categories.
Because if we are ever to live in a world where humans are free to identify, love, pray,
vote, debate, etc. without arbitrary constraint, we must first live in a world where our art can do
that, too. By requiring our literature to conform to outmoded, binary paradigms which no longer
accurately describe all of its specimens, we are conditioning our society to force itself into other
categories that fit like hand-me-downs, the elastic stretched and fabric threadbare, or otherwise
so small that they begin to choke. By calling prose simply that—“prose”—we expand the
possibilities of our literature, and force its readers to engage in the sort of adaptive, dynamic
thought required elsewhere in this cultural moment. Fluidity of literary begets fluidity of life.
We abide polarity because for so long our teachers have told us to. Because we are afraid
—of change, of uncertainty, of not-knowing. Because we have scant practice inhabiting the fluid
experiences that increasingly characterize contemporary life. Because we have had no chance to
swim into the estuary safely, without dire, flesh-and-blood repercussion—via art, via literature.
When, as a child, I was forced to decide whether I was black or white, it was within a
culture either unwilling or incapable of championing both. Race was my first introduction to
binaries, and it was through race that I was conditioned to suppress my appetite for everything all
at once. Similarly, I have for many years now been required to enunciate the type of writing I
!10
make. On school and grant applications, I’ve categorized my work as “fiction” using the same
sort of one-drop logic that has failed my ethnicity. And in casual conversation, I’ve assented
when asked if I’m writing a “novel” just to avoid the thorny, overly-involved explanation a more
honest answer would require. To write now in defense of “prose” is more than simply an exercise
in quibbling. It is more than semantics. It is a stance that suggests I’m no longer willing to abide
norms—literary or otherwise—that have forced the marginalized to stomach the mainstream.
The examples (books, movies, political movements, sexualities, genders, pronouns, racial
identifications, etc.) that litter the spectrum between their respective poles have, by and large,
had to smuggle themselves into our culture like contraband, like outcasts. They have had to
“pass” for something they are not, adopting limited identities that deny and distort their true
character. When what I am arguing is that perhaps we shouldn’t just bubble-in every option they
give us. Nor should we leave them blank in protest. We should tear the Scantron to tatters and
place it in the trash instead.
!11
2) A Cloud in Trousers
DISCUSSED: The Catcher in the Rye, Charlie Kaufman, Krblin Jihn Cabin, in-the-flesh
Trystero, 2007 Venice Biennial, Sophie Calle, unorthodox sleuthing, feral point of view,
blackmail, the contours of our philology.
My copy of The Catcher in the Rye was purchased after a long afternoon at the now-
defunct Old Town Mall Bookstar in Torrance, California before I had even began the awkward
tumble into puberty. These were the years my mother and I would spend (very) long hours in the
bookstore—either Bookstar in Torrance or Either/Or Bookstore in Hermosa Beach—perusing the
aisles and sampling the wares without regard for the clock, trying (I think) to use books as a
salve for the wounds caused by her divorce from my father. Like most my age, I was interested
almost exclusively in fiction. I was interested almost exclusively in escape. Those books that
populated the non-fiction aisles seemed superfluous—what they contained I imagined I could
learn simply by living. No need to read things on the page I would, in time, experience in the
flesh. Fiction, on the other hand, promised the endless possibility of imagination, worlds where
Indian figurines would come to life in cupboards or young boys could sail across the ocean in
giant peaches.
But something felt immediately different about The Catcher in the Rye. Like many, I
pulled it down from the shelf because the cover of its early 1990s paperback edition stood in
stark contrast to its brightly illustrated and ornately decorated neighbors. That simple, white
cover was adorned only by the all-caps title and author in Times New Roman, the mandatory
barcode on its back cover, and a tasteful, angled rainbow made of bars that morphed from blue to
purple to red to yellow in the upper left corner. Conspicuously absent was any sort of summary.
!12
Nor were there to be found any glowing recommendations or endorsements. Its genre affiliation
(“fiction”) was printed only on the book’s spine, and even then in a font so small that I’m very
liable to have missed it altogether. It was a book design pared back to its bare minimum, and it
found an enthusiastic home in my young, curious hands, eager to decipher the mystery of this
black sheep (white as it may have been).

!13
Figure 1 Figure 2

To this day, I am highly sensitive to the echoes of this clandestine discovery. I describe it
sometimes as if I’m being let in on a secret hidden in plain sight. The hallmarks of a Catcher-
esque discovery include a sense of slippage, as if I have happened upon some artifact created
without regard for the rules that dictate its medium, as if I am getting to peel back the skin of the
world to see the wrench jamming up the gears. Like watching the credits roll for the 2002 movie
Adaptation, for which Charlie Kaufman was nominated for an Oscar alongside a (fictional?)
brother (“Donald”) for best original screenplay. Stopping, for instance, to read the cryptic
!14
Figure 3
message of a Toynbee Tile in Philadelphia as a young man—“TOYNBEE IDEA IN Kubrick’s
2001 RESURRECTED DEAD ON PLANET JUPITER.” Or learning the (fictional?) history of
an alternate civil war in the deserts of California from the plaques that flank the Krblin Jihn
Cabin in Joshua Tree, California. And I once took a photograph in the mid-aughts of a concrete
strut underneath the Williamsburg Bridge on which was painted the Trystero emblem
symbolizing the (fictional?) underground mail system “w.a.s.t.e.” from Thomas Pynchon’s novel
The Crying of Lot 49.

The Atlas Obscura website is a repository for this sort of liminal experience, and collects
in one digital locale many disparate artifacts that have in common a complex relationship to
!15
Figure 4
reality. As with my edition of The Catcher in the Rye, I am piqued most by work that does not
announce its mode with grand fanfare and that sidesteps the fidelity of its content to the world-at-
large. Rather, this is the type of work that never actively defines its relationship to the world, and
which is content to let its audience bicker over how, exactly, to interpret and categorize it.
On my first wide-eyed, shoestring-budget trip to Europe, during which I stayed with
friends and family all over the continent and ate as thriftily as possible so as to extend my
sojourn, I made just this type of discovery at the French pavilion of the 2007 Venice Biennial. At
just 24, I knew nothing of the international art show, and stumbled around the city wondering
vaguely what exactly I had wandered myself into. Villas and piazzas and porticos had been
coopted by sculptures and murals and soundscapes and etc., but because it was my first visit to
Venice, I had an underlying suspicion that this was simply business as usual for the sinking,
artistic city. Art was everywhere. The sound of quartets reverberated between the narrow alleys
and canals. Pamphlets and directories and signage urged me this way and that to exhibitions and
performances. I saw, in the American pavilion, an improvised word-art wall painting by
Raymond Pettibon, and spent significant time in a state of ogling fanboy. How lucky I was to
happen upon a hometown hero of mine, a man responsible for most of the art that decorate my
favorite LPs, so far away from home, making ephemeral art that I would never be able to see
otherwise! This stroke of fortune was only to be trumped by the epiphany that awaited me
nearby.
The art (if, indeed, that’s what we want to call it) adorning Sophie Calle’s Take Care of
Yourself exhibition at the 2007 Venice Biennial consisted of photographs, videos, songs, textual
analyses, and diagrams all strewn about the walls with little to no explanation. Because much of
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the exhibit was presented in French or subtitled in English, I quickly grew impatient and had
begun to plot a hasty escape when, from the video wall, I began to hear the voice of the Canadian
singer Feist swirl into a looped and layered a cappella performance given in a cramped kitchen
through a microphone and small guitar amplifier. I could from time to time make out what I think
was the phrase “stop lying now,” but the three-plus minutes of looping tangled the words into a
ribbon of somber harmony that obfuscated the lyrics. Regardless, the message was
communicated through the mournful melody—something was amiss, and love seemed the only
possible culprit. Towards the end of the video, I stood transfixed as Feist sat into a kitchen chair,
picked up an errant piece of paper, and grappled with its contents as if they were insufficient,
tawdry. I was rapt. Curious. Wondered what this exhibit was all about, anyway? Suddenly, with
renewed interest, I returned to the front of the hall and read from the translated artist statement
posted on the wall what, exactly, Calle had amassed:
I received an email telling me it was over.
I didn’t know how to respond.
It was almost as if it hadn’t been meant for me.
It ended with the words, “Take care of yourself.”
And so I did.
I asked 107 women (including two made from wood and one with feathers),
chosen for their profession or skills, to interpret this letter.
To analyze it, comment on it, dance it, sing it.
Dissect it. Exhaust it. Understand it for me.
Answer for me.
It was a way of taking the time to break up.
A way of taking care of myself. (Calle Take Care of Yourself)
Though she was already by then one of France’s greatest living artists, I had never before
heard of Sophie Calle. While this says far more about my egregious ignorance than it does her
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success (she has been awarded the Hasselblad Award, shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse
Photography Prize, and presented with the Centenary Medal by the Royal Photographic Society),
I think it also has something to do with the difficulty critics and audiences alike have in placing
her work within the framework of a larger artistic movement or medium. Take Care of Yourself is
but one ingenious example of how Calle effortlessly erodes the division between art and life,
between photography and writing, between performance and documentation. The raw material
that inspires her art is also part of it, sometimes in the form of a break-up email, sometimes in the
form of her mother’s diaries, sometimes in the form of the belongings packed into a stranger’s
valise. And yet, this is more than diaristic navel-gazing. And Calle is decidedly more than a mere
exhibitionist. Her work is as poignant as it is vulnerable, and though she stumbled onto a method
of using her own life as content, the formal considerations are vast and provoking. Sometimes
the result is a collection of various mediums executed by a cadre of 107 women, like the one in
Venice that acted out a public catharsis. But even when the result is more traditional, like a book,
it challenges our assumptions of the medium nonetheless.
Of these, none is more emblematic than The Address Book, a slim, modestly-titled book
that collects a series of curious columns and accompanying photographs Calle published in the
French newspaper Libération in the mid-1980s. The Address Book starts off innocently enough.
“I found an address book,” Calle tells us, “on the Rue des Martyrs.” This was at the end of June
in a 1983 Paris that had yet to succumb to the fate of smartphones, when numbers and addresses
were still kept in analog ledgers by hand. Address books were a highly confidential collection of
contacts that defined the company one kept. But in Calle’s deft hands, this stranger’s address
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book became the impetus for art. Her introduction explained the constraints by which she would
operate:
I decided to photocopy the contents before sending it back anonymously to its owner,
whose address is inscribed on the endpaper. I will contact the people whose names are
noted down. I will tell them, “I found an address book on the street by chance. Your
number was in it. I’d like to meet you.” I’ll ask them to tell me about the owner of the
address book, whose name I’ll only reveal in person, if they agree to meet me.
Thus, I will get to know this man through his friends and acquaintances. I will try to
discover who he is without ever meeting him, and I will try to produce a portrait of him
over and undetermined length of time that will depend on the willingness of his friends to
talk about him—and on the turns taken by the events.
This project will be published daily in Libération. I have to turn my texts in three
days before publication.
The man’s name is Pierre D.
What follows is a series of dated entries that transcribe and detail the circumstances of
interviews Calle conducts with the people populating Pierre D.’s address book. Her goal,
ostensibly, is to create a portrait of this man she has never met and whom she is only connected
to by chance. From the address book itself, the portrait begins to take shape via details Calle
presents flatly, as if she is a scientist observing a specimen under microscope:
When a person is deceased, Pierre D. does not cross out the name. He adds “died in…”
next to it with the month and year, not the day. When a birth occurs, he writes the first
name of the child below those of the two parents. This information is usually added in red
ink. Isolated in the lower right corner of the last page is this sentence: “The quick brown
fox jumps over the lazy dog.” (Wednesday, August 3, 1983)
These idiosyncrasies give Pierre D. dimension. They suggest a man engaged in solving
the problem of life in his own particular manner, with red ink for births and nursery rhymes in
lieu of doodles. And in the interviews themselves, acquaintance after acquaintance gives more
shape and shading to the stranger. A man named Paul B. tells us that Pierre “is extremely
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intelligent,” but also that he once said to Paul during a trip to Algeria, “‘Stay here. Don’t leave
me. I get scared in planes’” (Tuesday, August 9, 1983). From an “intimate friend” named
Marianne B., we learn that when she thinks of Pierre, it always reminds her of a sentence by
Mayakovski: “He is a cloud in trousers” (Monday, August 22, 1983). And from Enzo U., we
learn that Pierre D. is a “plant killer.” “The last time he stayed at my apartment,” says Enzo,
he let eighteen of them die. I had asked him to give them a little water every night. It was
summer time; I was in Africa. When I came back, he opened the door. He was wearing a
kind of safari jacket. He had a big cigar in one hand and a drink in the other. He looked
satisfied. All around him the plants were black, charred. (Wednesday, August 24, 1983)
Yet and still, while Pierre D. is the subject of Calle’s unorthodox sleuthing, what becomes
plainly obvious is that Calle herself is the book’s true main character. The plot, so far as we
might pretend there is one, feels more like a cascade of raising stakes where Calle follows her
neuroses nearer and nearer to Pierre’s life—calling his phone, traipsing through the halls of his
apartment, catching eyes with Pierre’s neighbor. It is the obsessive behavior of a stalker, without
the motivation of revenge or lust. While we are never directly privy to Calle’s emotional state,
the portrait her hunt paints is of a woman capable of falling so deep into the narrows of
happenstance that she seems incapable of extricating herself. We read only in part to see if she
might actually make contact with Pierre D. The deeper seduction of the book, though, is that for
a brief spell we might abandon our own decorum and social norms and inhabit Calle’s feral point
of view instead. Hers is a world where it is perfectly normal to follow strangers to the ends of the
earth, or at least to a childhood home, to watch Pierre D.’s father gather the mail, “[t]rying to
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imagine the places where he went as a child…of the many times he must have crossed the little
bridge to go by the river and watch the barges” (Thursday, September 1, 1983).
The Address Book is a stirring example of a book that benefits from having no home field
advantage in the bookstore or library. It is a drifter. It wanders. It forces us constantly to wonder
what, exactly, it is. I can imagine a bit of pride Calle might have for writing a book that so
joyfully confounds categorization. Critical to its formal approach is its original serialization and
the suggestion in its introductory note that Calle is a slave to “the turns taken by the events.”
This transparenting of the process conceptualizes the book as a record of events rather than a
constructed narrative. As such, much of its magnetism is derived from the in-real-time-edness of
the text which puts us in lockstep with Calle’s point of view even more forcefully than a
traditional first-person narrator. Since she is not writing in retrospect or from omniscience, the
events themselves (and not a manipulative, overbearing author) are in the driver’s seat. This
reading experience is rare, and is about as close as reading gets to mimicking how we experience
the real world.
As we will see with W.G. Sebald, Calle’s use of photography also tethers the book to the
real world, but only by a slackened thread. Included are photographs that purport to show the
address book itself, and askance shots of interviewees and pertinent locales. But there are also
associative images—paintings, stock photographs (of oddly-shaped trees), postcards (of Nordic
polar bears)—that connect sometimes only tangentially to the text. The interplay between the
two mediums lends both a whimsy and gravity to the work, and offers the reader the difficult
task of positioning the events recorded in relation to the world from which they emanate. “In my
work it is the text that has counted most,” wrote Calle in the essay that accompanied her
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Hasselblad Award monograph True Stories. “And yet, the image was the beginning of
everything” (13). The suggested factuality of the photographs is called into question the more
they shy away from pure illustration. Why this photograph? we wonder. Is this an actual picture
of Pierre D. from behind, looking out the window? Of course, these questions are never
answered. What’s more, that they linger nudges us towards other concerns regarding fidelity. Is
this actually what Enzo U. said? Is there even a living, breathing Enzo U. in the first place? Was
there even an address book to begin with?
The controversial lore surrounding the 1983 newspaper columns that comprise The
Address Book was a large part of the publicity when Siglio Press published the book in 2012.
“When Pierre D. found out that Ms. Calle was calling all of his friends and publishing her finds
in the newspaper,” explains one critic in Observer, “he threatened to sue her and demanded that
Libération publish nude photos of Ms. Calle in a retaliatory invasion of privacy. As a result, Ms.
Calle agreed not to publish the work until after the death of Pierre D.” (Jovanovic). As much as
this might lend corroborative context to Siglio’s edition of The Address Book and explain its
extended journey to publication, it does not “solve” the book. What remains even after we accept
that a Pierre D. did (actually) exist and did once lose his address book is a work of art that
formally explores how else we might arrest our experiences in literary form. For all of Calle’s
investigating, Pierre D. remains as elusive to the reader as the mode of the text itself.
Calle’s work is customarily thought of as “performance art” and, when a book manifests,
it is usually stocked in some semblance of a “fine art” section where photographic monographs
are on display. I suppose this isn’t an altogether incorrect home for her work, but neither does it
reflect accurately to the experience of reading—experiencing—it. While Calle very often
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operates within a transparent constraint (interviewing people in a found address book; following
a stranger through the streets and canals of Venice; rifling through luggage as a hotel maid-cum-
documentarian), her words and images are inflected with imagination and idiosyncrasy. She is no
documentarian. Her books are not informational catalogues. My sense is always of refraction, as
if Calle sees the world through prismic eyes. She finds those passing moments of daily life
worthy of more than passing without comment. Otherwise, she creates such moments. And
comments upon them. Her language is always direct, but also filigreed and flourished. And
though it is often prose, much of her writing reads like small poems:
I underwent a medical examination. I had to fill out a six-page questionnaire of nearly
300 questions. To all except one, I answer NO. Have you contracted rubella, variola,
cholera, chickenpox, tetanus, tuberculosis, yellow fever, scarlet fever or typhoid? Do you
suffer from a heart murmur, high cholesterol, hypertension, diabetes? Are you prone to
vertigo? Do you have headaches, stomachaches, palpitations, nausea, children, allergies,
strokes, kidney stones, dizzy spells, epileptic seizures, lower back pain, gastro-intestinal
disorders, inflamed gyms, hearing troubles, blurred vision? And suddenly, out of
nowhere, lost amidst this sea of questions, the following one: “Are you sad?” (True
Stories 94)
The fact that our booksellers and librarians do not currently have a worthy home for these
books is evidence enough that we may need to rethink the habitat of our literary kingdom. I do
not suggest this for simplicity’s sake—for ease of discovering Sophie Calle amongst the stacks.
Hers is work curious and accomplished enough to demand an audience no matter its
categorization. I suggest this because proffering a more encompassing term that would befit
Calle’s collective oeuvre would create a consciousness that could/would beget other work
similarly capable of challenging norms of production (writing) and consumption (reading). That
Calle is discussed primarily as an “artist” and only very rarely thought of as a “writer” indicates
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that we are stubbornly remiss to accept estuarial texts into the canon that do not abide the strict
comportment of fiction and non-fiction. But what do we do with writing that, like Pierre D., is as
boundless as a cloud? Is there a way to reimagine the contours of our philology?
One possible way forward might be for literature to descend from the horse on high and
take stock of how other mediums organize themselves. It could be that a system that prioritized
formal attributes over fidelity to truth—as we do with, say, music—would yield a far more
diverse, stimulating, and ultimately progressive literary landscape.
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3) Something beyond the phenomenal
DISCUSSED: brand-new cellophane-wrapped vinyl, 2/4 Batucada rhythm, Kurt Cobain,
Elliott Smith, Paul Simon, The Hatred of Poetry, Leaves of Grass, atomic sublimation,
“tell it slant,” In Defense of Poesie, virga.
When it comes to music, we do not peruse in binaries. When it comes to music, genre is
delineated by aesthetics, not some feigned fidelity to truth. What’s more, we accept this in stride,
without a flinch. Should you find yourself at the local record store (assuming, of course, that one
persists (triumphantly) in your vicinity), you will not find shelves assigned to “fiction” or its
corollary. You won’t find, underneath the brand-new cellophane-wrapped vinyl displays, a beat-
up “non-fiction” bargain bin. These terms do not readily apply to music. Consumers, critics, and
creators alike have eschewed this paradigm. Instead, you will find the store arranged by genres
like Rock, Rap, Reggae, Pop, Classical, Jazz, and Country, which reverberate through our mind’s
ear like a twist of the radio dial as we plot our path through the aisles.
By now, these are phenotypes we habitually take for granted. They each arrive with the
distinctive flare of birdcall and carry with them a long legacy of exemplars who have helped
carved out the specific musical landscapes they encompass. The twang of a Bluegrass fiddle vies
for attention amidst the 808 drum loop of a classic Hip-Hop song and the swell of feedback
careening out of an Alternative classic. And if you happen to be in a particularly haute
establishment—one of those stalwart independent stores with clerks who barely acknowledge
your existence and whose obscure band T-shirts intimidate you into swallowing rudimentary
questions—it may be that the genre signage hanging from the ceiling is aided by cartoon visuals
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which play-up known stereotypes. Dreadlocks for the reggae singer. Mohawks and chains for the
punk band. I have been in many such record stores, and the practice always underscores just how
much our contemporary approach to music is rooted in questions of aesthetics—both aural and
visual—rather than the underlying content those aesthetics frame.
It is worth pausing, though, to think about just how differently we assess literature than
we do music. With literature the essential question seems to be, Did this happen? Before even
one page has been read, (non-)fictional categorization pre-requires us to reckon with our book’s
purported (counter-)factuality. Yet with music we seem to wonder instead, How did this happen?
Each musical category communicates not a unique relationship to truth, but an established set of
aural qualities that distinguish one generic style from the next. This approach differentiates each
genre according to aesthetic criteria like instrumentation, tempo, time signatures, volume,
melodies, and so on. And while certain lyrical tropes do recur within and add homogenous
character to specific genres, questions of fidelity are subjugated to questions of aesthetic form.
Rock is such because it involves amplified guitars.
Folk because its guitars are acoustic.
Samba because of its 2/4 Batucada rhythm.
Think, for example, what would happen if you inquired of an obscure-band-T-shirt-
wearing record store clerk, “So, where can I find your non-fiction records?” Or, perhaps
(sheepishly): “Any recommendations for a good fiction album?”
Which is not to suggest that when, for instance, I listen now to Kurt Cobain sing (on the
Nirvana song “Milk It”), “Look on the bright side, suicide” or when Elliott Smith asks me (in the
posthumously released “King’s Crossing”) to, “Give [him] one good reason not to do it” I hear
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anything other than a suicide note. Or that when Paul Simon tells me (in “Graceland”) first that
his “traveling companion is nine years old / He is the child of my first marriage” and later that
“losing love / Is like a window in your heart” I hear anything other than a coping mechanism—
his, my own. When an artist’s art is borne out by his life, the stakes of both seem multiplied one
by the other. The cross-pollination is not simply fascinating. The verifiable factuality of artistic
content underwrites the possibility of it occurring in similar fashion in other lives, namely: our
own.
In fact, I would argue that the overwhelming power music has over us is due in large part
to the strong correlation we cement between its performers and performances. That we receive
the content of song in the performer’s voice goes a long way to affixing its tableaux to the
performer’s biography. Listeners, divorced from the process of creation, are free to assume a
creation myth that follows the most obvious, direct route from lived experience to the artistic
expression of it. As such, it may be that music is not categorized into (non-)fictional camps
because the assumption of lyrical veracity is the locus of its power to affect us. We try not to ruin
music by asking too many questions of it. If Cobain or Smith are discussing suicide, it is because
they were contemplating it, a fact confirmed by the deaths their songs presage. And when Simon
describes the ache of a heart broken by errant love, it is an errant love corroborated by
biographies, interview, and tabloids alike.
Given their ancient symbiosis and parallel development, it is no wonder that we approach
the categorization of our poetry much like we approach our music. As with music, we do not ask
the polite, turtle-necked clerk to direct us to the section of the bookstore housing “non-fiction
poetry.” The distinction sounds (rightly) superfluous. Gangly. Inappropriate. Poetry, like music,
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is not subjected to the fiction/non-fiction litmus test which overburdens prose. Rather, poetry
roams free, wholly unfettered by such pedantic pettifog, and the broad range of work which that
term—“poetry—”corrals is as varied in style, substance, and fidelity to “the real world” as its
motley practitioners.
Underpinning poetry’s DNA is the (often) complicated relationship between speaker and
author, between the artifact of the poem and the immediate world from which it sprang. As with
music, there is a unique magnetism created by the mysterious (confusing? misleading?
erroneous? exaggerated? assumed?) relationship between poet and poem. How often have I been
in a classroom and been warned tacitly by the instructor not to assume the poet and speaker share
the same voice! Though: of course this is what we do. Because: the words have emanated from
the poet. Because: the poem, even if misleading, has its origins in the mind, life, and experiences
of the poet. We read, in part, to gain a foothold on the poet’s milieu, and her words create inroads
from the art back to its source. Some paths are strewn with impediments and wander aimlessly to
dead-end. Some are (seemingly) well-paved and traffic-free. In either case, by reading a poem
we inevitably feel closer to the poet, whether we should or not.
This phenomenon is described well by the poet/novelist Ben Lerner in his slim manifesto
The Hatred of Poetry. In it, he highlights the fact that Walt Whitman omitted his byline from the
original title page of his Leaves of Grass. “The effect,” says Lerner, “is to signal ‘Walt Whitman’
is an enabling fiction produced by the poems themselves—a figure with whom readers can
identify, whether in 1855 or in the future” (48). Lerner here suggests that by disappearing
himself from authorship, Whitman’s poems democratize themselves, allowing their readers to
sublimate into the consciousness of the poem’s reality without the poet himself getting in the
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way. “Whitman in fact divulges very little personal information,” reminds Lerner, “particulars
that might get in the way of our ability to exchange atoms” (48).
This is because an indispensable component of a poem’s spell is the fluidity with which it
navigates between the poles of fact and fiction. Even if the poet is well- or personally known to
the reader, assumptions about its origin are not preemptively corroborated by the binary system
with which we shackle prose. There is no fictional poetry. There is no non-fictional poetry. There
is only the one—poetry. It contains multitudes. This lack of distinction creates a reading
experience which welcomes a healthy sense of confusion, discrepancy, and not-knowing, and
forces us to keep even well-known poems suspended in a spectrum of factuality that invites
multiple, if not limitless, interpretations.
I think of poems, sometimes, like that classic optical illusion that beckons us to decide
whether we are looking at a fair maiden or an old hag:
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Figure 5
It is less important which image we see first than the simple fact that our eye never fully
settles on one image or the next. As soon as we are sure that we see the fair maiden, her mink
coat framing her delicate, purposely-turned face, our eye skips and transforms that dot of
cheekbone into the hag’s unsightly nose mole.
It is this way with poems, too, which squirm fish-like just beyond our grasp. This
fluctuating transparency is a direct result of the nebulous and often contradictory rules we expect
and/or allow a poet(t/m) to abide. Can a poet like Langston Hughes or Charles Bukowski or
Robert Frost conflate speaker and poet into one entity? Clearly. Or can T.S. Eliot or Edward
Arlington Robinson or Sir Philip Sidney ventriloquize and inhabit fictional characters? Yes and
then some. And what do we do with Stephen Crane? Or Charles Baudelaire? Or Emily
Dickinson, who famously instructed us to “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant” (506).
Most often, we categorize poems by the aesthetic rules they follow. The fourteen lines
and rhyming couplet of a sonnet. The alphabetic sequencing of an abecedarian. The intricate
interlocking of a sestina. The great contemporary anything-goes of free verse. Much how genre
works in music, the formal ubiquity of these poetic templates bring to the surface the unique
content of each poem. The signature of a beloved guitar solo exalts an otherwise forgetful classic
rock song just as a well-phrased line might make an otherwise drab poem stand out. And while a
guitar bend is clearly incapable of articulating (counter)factuality, even the most transparent line
of poetry is counterbalanced by the medium’s wholesale lack of commitment.
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The Renaissance poet Sir Philip Sidney placed poets in greater contrasts to other
practitioners of language. For him, “the poet never maketh any circles about your imagination, to
conjure you to believe for true what he writeth: he citeth not authorities of other histories, but
even for his entry calleth the sweet Muses to inspire into him a good invention;in troth, not
labouring to tell you what is or is not, but what should or should not be” (Sidney). Comparing
poets to historians and lawyers, Sidney differentiates suggests that the greatest distinction
between the one and the others is objective. While the historian and lawyer and astronomer and
geometrician use language to inform, the poet’s language is a “conceit” whose aim is “an
imaginative ground-plot of a profitable invention” (Sidney). More than 500 years on, though,
that strict distinction has eroded. For poets, ambiguity is device used as consciously as the
allegories that Sidney identified during his own epoch.
This is what I take Dickinson’s iconic line to mean. That looking for truth (or “Truth”) is
a lot like stargazing. How the mechanics of our eye prohibit us from seeing the star we stare at
directly. How the exact ratio of lens to cornea to iris the human eye requires us to look just to
either side of celestial objects in order to see them best, brightest. Poems know that that it is this
way with truth (or “Truth”) as well. They are coy and flirtatious, but purposefully non-committal,
beckoning furtively to fictive elements one line while embracing non-fiction in the next. For
Lerner, poems are like “virga,” his “favorite kind of weather”:
streaks of water or ice particles trailing from a cloud that evaporate before they reach the
ground. It’s ra rainfall that never quite closes the gap between heaven and earth, between
the dream and fire; it’s a mark for verse that is not yet, or no longer, or not merely actual;
they are phenomena whose failure to become or remain fully real allows them to figure
something beyond the phenomenal. (The Hatred of Poetry 75).
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We forgive poems their dalliances. And, in many cases, we celebrate the transgression.
Encourage it. Define poems in part by their ambidexterity. Fluidity. Freedom. Poetry’s is a long
leash, if in fact it is confined by one at all. They seek “something beyond the phenomenal,” and
so we grant them a wide berth. Poetry is free to stick its nose into places other writing can’t quite
reach. To yank into the spotlight those fluid truths (“Truths”?) for which we’ve mistakenly
decided the polarity of prose isn’t suited.
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4) that Rambling, Inconsistent Creature
DISCUSSED: ventriloquized text, sea-faring subject matter, the occasional marooned
compatriot, Daniel Defoe, Alexander Selkirk, womb vs. jail cell, devotional texts,
Gutenberg’ s printing press, Charles Gildon, the beauty mark of a cover model, the
pillory, Rules of Art.
For all of the credit that Robinson Crusoe deserves for its role in establishing the English
novel, perhaps its most curious characteristic is that, like Leaves of Grass, nowhere in the
original 1719 manuscript is it attributed to its author, Daniel Defoe. Rather, as its iconic title page
reports, the book is a record of
THE LIFE AND STRANGE SURPIZING [sic] ADVENTURES OF ROBINSON
CRUSOE, Of YORK, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-
inhabited Island on the Coast of AMERICA, near the Mouth of the Great River of
Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but
himself. WITH An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver’d by PYRATES [sic].
Written by Himself. (2)
That last bit—“Written by Himself”—which is dubiously italicized in the original
manuscript, calls special attention to its murky authorship and, in a phrase, encapsulates/creates
the entire confusing divide between fictive and non-fictive prose for centuries to come.
The effect of attributing the text of Robinson Crusoe to its fictional first-person narrator
is to disappear Defoe altogether, like a puppeteer with invisible strings. A generous reading of the
tactic suggests an author trying to solve the problem of genre when his book doesn’t fit snugly
into any that existed at the time. The term “fiction,” though long used to describe “the act of
fashioning or imitating,” was still many decades away from its prevailing association with “the
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species of literature which is concerned with the narration of imaginary events and the portraiture
of imaginary characters” (“fiction”). The complex triangulation between author, (first-person)
narrator, and made-up plot was still in an embryonic stage. Critics of the age leaned on terms like
“romance,” “fable,” and “allegory” to describe inventive prose, all of which feel insufficient to
describe what Defoe had created. Defoe’s choice to remove his own name from the byline
anticipates difficulty the public may have had fully comprehending a ventriloquized first-person
text, and suggests a novice readership uncomfortable squaring first-person point of view with
such fully realized make-believe.
A more cynical view might suppose that Defoe was capitalizing on the popularity of
contemporary travel books and the innate authority they derived from first-hand knowledge. In
fact, as one 1774 letter penned by then-English-poet-laureate Thomas Warton suggests, “at its
first publication, and for some time afterwards, [Robinson Crusoe] was universally received and
credited as genuine history. A fictitious narrative of this sort was then a new thing” (320). It was
the eyewitness nature of these travel books, exemplified by William Dampier’s A New Voyage
round the World (London, 1703), Edward Cooke’s A Voyage to the South Sea, and around the
World (London, 1712), and Woodes Rogers’s A Cruising Voyage round the World (London,
1712), that corroborated their otherwise far-fetched, sea-faring subject matter for a landlocked
readership. Their autobiographic form lended gravitas to reports of battles, pirates, native
encounters, and the occasional marooned compatriot.
For Defoe to have included a competing byline in a literary market flooded with such
books would have underscored the invention of Robinson Crusoe, rendering his narrative
comparatively impotent from page one. Defoe’s tactic is to disguise his imagined “adventures” in
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Crusoe’s voice, thus evading the genre question altogether. As the writer Charles Lamb once
remarked, the book
is perfect illusion. The author never appears in these self-narratives (for so they ought to
be called, or rather auto-biographies) but the narrator chains us down to an implicit belief
in every thing he says. There is all the minute detail of a log-book in it. Dates are
painfully preset upon the memory. Facts are repeated over and over in varying phrases,
till you cannot chuse [sic] but to believe them. It is like reading evidence in a court of
Justice. (269)
Characterizing Defoe’s work as “perfect illusion” casts him as a literary magician and
suggests deception and sleight of hand in his writing process. This is, at least in part, confirmed
by the audacious attribution on its title page. His process was premeditated—exquisitely
calculated to pass its fiction for fact. To many early 18
th
-century readers, Robinson Crusoe would
have presented much like these other travel books, and would have been particularly reminiscent
of the plight of Alexander Selkirk, a mariner famously marooned for four years and four months
on what was then known as Juan Fernández Island.
There has been perhaps too much scholarly debate over who, exactly, inspired the
character Robinson Crusoe. The guesswork and assumption that pervades whole tomes can
sometimes read like pedantic retrospective sleuthing, and you can almost see cork-board walls
littered with pins and colorful string. This whodunnit is in some ways like a chicken and
cracked-egg dilemma, trying to determine origin from a spate of fragmented source material. At
the very least it is certain, however, that Defoe would have been especially aware of Selkirk,
whose story came to prominence through the travel books of both Cooke and Rogers in 1712.
Both accounts agree on the fated circumstances of Selkirk’s “adventure,” namely that he became
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a castaway from the Cinque Ports after “some Difference with the Captain of the said Ship, and
she being leaky” and spent “four Years and four Months, living on Goats and Cabbages that grow
on Trees, Turnips, Parsnips, &c.” before they discovered him “cloath’d in a Goat’s Skin Jacket,
Breeches, and a Cap, sew’d together with Thongs of the same” (Cooke 230). And, as the scholar
James Sutherland rightly points out, an extensive article about Selkirk’s exploits written by
Richard Steele in his periodical The Englishman on December 3, 1713 would have been well
known both by Defoe and his readership (344-345). In it, Steele discusses more than just the nuts
and bolts of Selkirk’s survival, detailing (like Crusoe) the course of his depression and trajectory
of his religious thoughts. The parallels between Selkirk and Crusoe are many and undeniable,
and give many “source” scholars all the evidence they need to read Robinson Crusoe as little
more than Selkirk’s embellished biography.
But Sutherland and other comprehensive scholars like J. Paul Hunter see the failure of
such direct, on-the-nose correlation. Travel books describing numerous castaway models were
profligate, and Hunter points out that “many castaways, in fact, underwent hardships much like
Crusoe’s, reacted to them much as he does, and recounted their experiences in a similarly
detailed way” (332-333). It could be that Defoe was influenced by the genre as a whole rather
than any one specific recounting, cherrypicking as he saw fit. For Sutherland, “Defoe’s
indebtedness to the Selkirk narratives was small; and indeed it was essential for [Defoe] as a
writer of fiction to conceal it as much as possible, since Selkirk’s experience was comparatively
fresh in the public mind” (344). Disappointingly, Sutherland’s exaggerated criticism relies
simply on inverting a practice common to the source scholars he seeks to discredit. His
concealment premise is defended in large part by enumerating the many ways that the particulars
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of Selkirk’s and Crusoe’s stories diverge, noting (amongst other details) Selkirk’s original diet of
turtles which is wholly absent from Crusoe’s story, the geographic discrepancies between
Selkirk’s Juan Fernandez Island and Crusoe’s Caribbean locale, and the fact that “Crusoe lived
for eight and twenty years on his desert island, whereas the isolated existence of Selkirk lasted
for rather less than four and a half years” (345). Obviously, though these alterations may have
gone a long way to fool contemporaneous readership, the modern reader is acutely aware that
such discrepancies function more like tools to avoid copyright infringement or likeness
arbitration than they do innovative fictive writing. If Defoe is truly “the father of the English
novel” (Joyce 321) as James Joyce claimed, it is not a claim justified by a text which simply
alters pop culture by shades and small degrees.
A more convincing argument regarding the true literary invention pioneered by Robinson
Crusoe should note not its pedestrian alteration of readily available source material, but its novel
use of readily available source material as a womb rather than a jail cell. This was the first major
instance of English prose that swam convincingly away from the safe harbor of eyewitness fact
into the uncharted waters of fabricated circumstance via an invented and fully-realized
consciousness. Though he may have been inspired by received stories, Defoe’s approach was
indeed revolutionary. The problematic impulse to pin the novel to any one particular source fails,
as Hunter points out, to “distinguish between what Defoe worked from (sources) and what he
worked toward (artistic aims)” and has “the effect of defining Robinson Crusoe itself as a
fictionalized travel book” (338). Distinguishing between “sources” and “artistic aims” is
Hunter’s elegant way of suggesting that Robinson Crusoe represents a significant step in “the
development of the novel as a literary form” because it charts a path away from received modes
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of English literature towards an experimental approach that invented, as Defoe later described it,
“one whole Scheme of a real Life” (241). This was writing that dared for the first time to invent a
three-dimensional consciousness from second-hand castaway reportage.
But thinking of Robinson Crusoe as “experimental” can be difficult given the
accumulation of three centuries of hindsight. Hunter pushes back firmly—and I think correctly—
against the source scholarship that has “been taken almost without dissent” since the publication
in 1924 of Arthur W. Secord’s authoritative Studies in the Narrative Method of Defoe. For
Hunter, the “placing of Robinson Crusoe itself in the tradition of travel literature is ultimately the
most misleading implication of such source studies” which “seem anxious to attribute a very
different role to Defoe’s imagination than to the imagination of most writers” (335-336).
Hunter’s scholarship instead describes in great detail the many Puritan traditions that informed
Robinson Crusoe in addition to travel books, including the guide tradition, providence tradition,
and spiritual biography. The influence of these devotional texts is apparent in both Crusoe’s
religious diatribes and the larger “coming-to-God” trajectory of his isolation. While Crusoe’s
narrative certainly communicates many dry, almost arithmetic facts that determined his survival,
it is ultimately an ideologically-oriented narrative whose aim is to communicate a complete
consciousness rather than a series of geographic facts and chronological episodes. Whereas
“[travel] writers…seem (or pretend) to be concerned with readers who expect more technical
information…which will benefit country and commerce”, “in Robinson Crusoe the facts about
various places are never presented as information for its own sake; each fact is introduced
because of its function in the narrative situation” (Hunter 339-341).
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And yet, in detailing the similarities the book has with so many disparate templates, it can
be tempting to view it as a hackneyed pastiche. Hunter is preoccupied with negating “the image
of Defoe as a compiler whose art consists in the crafty fusion of unrelated anecdotes” (338).
There is an underlying anxiety palpable in many studies of Robinson Crusoe to lend it the type of
compositional complexity that justifies it as a cornerstone of the English novel. Merely to have
mimicked travel books, or to have combined them with traditional Puritan modes of writing,
does not go far enough to convince most. Whether the scholarship champions a procedural (as in
the case of Secord and other source-ists) or ideological (as with Sutherland, Hunter, and many
others) emphasis, the objective is the same: to differentiate Robinson Crusoe from other extant
texts. To return to Warton’s letter, we want to know why, exactly, “a fictitious narrative of this
sort”—emphasis mine—“was then a new thing” (320). What “sort” of book is Robinson Crusoe?
How, exactly, was it a “new thing”?
It is best, I think, to retain a healthy sense of the printed book as a relatively new
technology at the time of Robinson Crusoe’s first edition. While Gutenberg’s printing press
began the mass proliferation of both printed material and literacy halfway through the 15
th

century, the rules which bound English literature were still very much in flux by the time Defoe’s
work began disseminating amongst the crowds of late 17
th
- and early 18
th
-century London. The
writer/scholar Amaranth Borsuk, in her engaging study on the history and development of the
book, reminds us that “writing itself fundamentally changed human consciousness, much as our
reliance on networked digital devices has altered us at the core” (60). If we think of the book as a
new technology—or at least an evolving one, like our smart phones and tablets—we can better
!39
appreciate Defoe as an innovator and see Robinson Crusoe as a pioneering achievement. Those
three simple, italicized words on the title page—“Written by Himself”—represent far more than
deception. They purposefully create an ambiguity that conceives of a literature bound not to the
rigid binary modalities to which it has now become accustomed, but as a fluid art form that
dissolves the boundary between experience, invention, and representation.
As with other experimental art, the extent to which Robinson Crusoe disrupts prevailing
paradigms can best be judged by the harsh criticism of Defoe’s contemporaries. Nowhere is the
dissonance created by the “dual” authorship of Robinson Crusoe better articulated than by
Charles Gildon, a minor literary figure who in September of 1719, mere months after the novel
was published, penned his own scathing critique in a pamphlet sardonically titled The Life and
Strange Suprizing Adventures of Mr. D——— De F———. By turns comedic, scathing,
indignant, jealous, and bitter, Gildon is evidence of an anxiety that Defoe elicited if not for his
novel approach, then for the success this novel approach garnered in sales and popularity. The
tract plays out in two distinct parts, the first a scatological Swift-ian dialogue between an
imagined “DeFoe” and the two main characters of his novel, Crusoe and Friday, who force the
author to eat and subsequently defecate his “fable” into his pants; and the second a more
impassioned (and sometimes line-by-line) rebuke of “the many Absurdities of [Defoe’s]
tale” (2). Gildon envisions Defoe as a poor man’s Proteus who has failed because he has
“raise[d] Beings” both “contradictory to common Sense” and also “destructive of Religion and
Morality” (vii). Throughout, these are Gidlon’s main attacks—that a) Defoe is sloppy with his
handling of narrative details, and b) Crusoe’s religious inconsistencies effectively prevent the
book from performing its duty to morally instruct mankind (35).
!40
Regarding the first argument, Gildon harps ad nauseam on minor quibbles and plot holes
that arise as a result of Defoe’s lapses of narrative attention. “[Y]ou seem very fond of all
Occasions of throwing in needless Absurdities to make the Truth of your Story still the more
doubted” (13) writes a stern Gildon to Defoe, before sabotaging his argument with nitpicking
gotchas: “I shall not take Notice of [Crusoe’s] striping himself to swim on Board, and then filling
his Pockets with Bisket [sic], because that is already taken Notice of in Publick [sic]” (15). What
Gildon fails in his naiveté to fully comprehend is that these discrepancies, while certainly
unintended by Defoe, actually texture the reading experience by serving as a constant reminder
of the author’s presence, undermining Crusoe’s autonomy, and calling curiously into question the
legitimacy of his first-person narration. To be sure, these are mistakes. Crusoe enumerates the
weapons he retrieves from the shipwreck on one page and decries his inability to defend himself
on another. He sees the eyes of a goat in a cave he previously suggests is too dark to see
anything. The contradictions amass and suggest failure to Gildon. And while his complaint is
warranted, these mistakes read, too, like the beauty mark of a cover model, or the master
carpenter’s stubborn raised nail. We are made aware of Defoe’s human imperfection through
these unintended authorial intrusions, like watching a chef spill soup in a newfangled open-air
kitchen. They transform the writing from feigned travel book into transparent artistic creation.
Gildon himself recognizes this, but perhaps because it is the first instance he has
encountered it, clearly cannot conceptualize the fertile territory these blemishes uncover. “I drew
thee from the consideration of my own Mind;” says Defoe in Gildon’s imagined satirical
dialogue with Crusoe and Friday, “I have been all my Life that Rambling, Inconsistent Creature,
which I have made thee” (x). This is a fair assessment of both Defoe and Crusoe, whose
!41
biographies mirror one another in both frequency and intensity of calamity. We can imagine
Defoe as a toddler surviving The Great Plague and Great Fire of London. And the disgruntled
Crusoe leaving his family behind for a life of South American slave trading. Or Defoe time and
time again going bankrupt, or being placed in pillory after being convicted of seditious libel.
And, of course, Crusoe’s eight and twenty years herding goats and domesticating cats. That both
Defoe and Crusoe are “Rambling, Inconsistent Creature[s]” is borne out through the book’s
many narrative imperfections. Those mistakes the author makes in writing are the same Crusoe
makes in narrating. This recasts the title page’s byline in a more generous light, suggesting that
what from one vantage is deception may really be Defoe commingling his own imperfect identity
with Crusoe’s.
And yet, Gildon’s attack goes deeper than plot holes and narrative fumbles. He
vehemently castigates Defoe for creating a character in Crusoe who is as inconsistent with his
survival activities as he is his faith. It is difficult now in our less pious age to fully empathize
with Gildon’s critique, especially when he writes directly to Defoe, “[Y]ou do not sufficiently
distinguish between the Fear of God, and the Fear of Danger to your own dear Carcass. The Fear
of God is an Excellence, a Virtue, a Duty…the Fear of Danger is mean, scandalous, unmanly, a
Vice, and the Beginning of Folly” (18-19). It would seem to the modern reader not that Defoe
fails to distinguish between these two fears, but that he very understandably suffers them equally.
Whereas Gildon reads from within a culture that required of its texts a didactic devotion to a
higher power, Defoe writes from a modern-leaning perspective that allows its characters to
traverse their milieu with complexity, contradiction, and imperfection. Crusoe’s relationship to
God is in constant flux. As is his psychology with regards to isolation and survival. He is just as
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often ecstatic as he is in complete despair, and religion sustains him just as much as Friday the
cannibal does.
Lacking a better template, Gildon mistakenly condemns Robinson Crusoe to the “Fable”
genre, and uses this ill-fitting end to fault Defoe’s predictably misfit means:
[Y]ou seem not to understand the very Nature of a Fable, which is a sort of Writing which
has always been esteem’d by the wisest and best of Men to be of great use to the
Instruction of Mankind; but then this Use and Instruction would naturally and plainly
arise from the Fable itself, in an evident and useful Moral, either exprest or understood;
but this is too large a Subject to go thro’, and to shew that by the Rules of Art you have
not attain’d any one End or Aim of a Writer of Fables in the Tale that you have given us.
(35)
Of course, Robinson Crusoe is not a fable. And the “Rules of Art” to which Gildon
subjects it are purposefully transgressed. Not, I don’t think, in a conscious attempt by Defoe to
establish a new path forward for an evolving literature, but because the prevalent modes of
literature did not permit for the book he felt most comfortable writing. Gildon’s outrage reads
like that of any geriatric establishment resisting impending change. And once Defoe realizes he
is the thorn in the side, it is an easy choice to double down. It speaks volumes that in the preface
of subsequent (and far less realized) installments of the Robinson Crusoe saga, Defoe does not
break character by admitting to being its true (“true”) author. “All the Endeavours of envious
People to reproach it with being a Romance,” he writes, “to search it for Errors in Geography,
Inconsistency in the Relation, and Contradictions in the Fact, have proved abortive, and as
impotent as malicious” (239). That term—“romance”—is as close as the 18
th
century vernacular
!43
Figure 6
can approximate, but it clearly does not sit well with Defoe. Though the word did even then
suggest a “fictitious narrative, usually in prose,…in which sensational or exciting events or
adventures form the central theme” (“romance”), it does not account for the symbiotic give and
take between author and narrator, nor Defoe’s purposeful redaction of distilled moral instruction.
His is a book about an Everyman whose humanity is accentuated by the extremity of his
desert island marooning. Writes Defoe (as Crusoe):
Had the common Way of Writing a Mans private History been taken, and I had given you
the Conduct or Life of a Man you knew, and whose Misfortunes and Infirmities, perhaps
you had sometimes unjustly triumph’d over; all I could have said would have yielded no
Diversion, and perhaps scarce have obtained a Reading, or at best no Attention; … Facts
that are form’d to touch the Mind, must be done a great Way off, and by somebody never
heard of…” (242-243)
!44
The efficacy of Robinson Crusoe derived in no small part from the fact that Defoe
masked its authorship. For argument’s sake, it can be useful to imagine him writing it “the
common Way.” Known well already to the London populace for his numerous public follies, he
is correct to assume that his byline would “scarce have obtained a Reading,” just as today’s
readership hungers far more for reality (to borrow David Shields’ phrasing), and spites even the
hint of small-fonted co-authorship and/or ghostwriters. We are as addicted to the horse’s mouth
now as they were then. The pseudo-autobiography carried with it an authenticity that would have
been undercut by the dichotomy of dual-authorship. Like the difficulty of trying to locate a star
by looking at it straight on, Defoe suggests an askance approach was the only at his disposal.
For Gildon, this deceit is unconscionable. The epigraph to his critical pamphlet reads
“Qui vult decipi, decipiatur”—Let him who wishes to be deceived, be deceived. This is an
attitude common to champions of the status quo. There is a moral argument being made against a
bend of the rules, and against creative license more broadly speaking. It is language beholden to
constraints, critical of those capable of breaking free of them. Yet even if deception was Defoe’s
crude original tactic, through its employ he created a curious type of literature that moved prose
towards an ambiguity we are still wrestling with today. The noted critic Ian Watt contends that
Defoe subjugated himself so well to Robinson Crusoe that his fictional creation has far eclipsed
his creator as a mythic archetypal figure central to Western culture (288-306). It may very well
be true that the name Robinson Crusoe is far more central to our culture than Daniel Defoe. Be
that as it may, both Gildon’s claim of deception and Watt’s mythologizing ignore the more
delicate practice of “allegory” that Defoe ham-fistedly attempted.
!45
Defoe’s tone is decidedly adamant in his defense of Robinson Crusoe. In the prologues of
both subsequent volumes of Crusoe’s “Adventures,” Defoe-cum-Crusoe harps repeatedly on the
“Truth” of the “Facts” of the tale as they are relayed. Read through Gildon’s eyes, this is simply
more of Defoe’s deceptive grandstanding meant to dupe his readers (and perhaps bolsters sales).
A more sympathetic reading prioritizes the reflexive quality of Defoe’s “Story” which, he writes,
“though Allegorical, is also Historical; and that it is the beautiful Representation of a Life of
unexampled Misfortunes” (240). It can be easy to forget that Robinson Crusoe was Defoe’s first
true work of extended fiction and was published when he was every bit of 59-years-old. It came
at the far side of a life that included seven children, multiple bankruptcies, numerous
imprisonments for debt and political writings, and even three days stuck in the pillory for
seditious libel. It is important, I think, to hover here for a moment on those three days Defoe
spent sandwiched between thick slabs of wood, exposed to the elements and ridicule of his peers,
in a contraption meant to squeeze out whatever shame imprisonment alone hadn’t.
It may be to romanticize too much his brief stint of public disgrace should we imagine
Defoe there in the pillory, vegetables and other foul tossed in his direction, seeing himself as a
man apart, stuck in the Newgate prison square as if in the desolation of a deserted desert island
with no one to save him but his own thoughts and prayers. This, though, is exactly his defense.
“In a Word,” he writes, “there’s not a Circumstance in the imaginary Story, but has its just
Allusion to a real Story, and chimes Part for Part, and Step for Step with the inimitable Life of
Robinson Crusoe” (242). While many take this as confirmation that he fashioned his tale after
the marooning of Alexander Selkirk, it is surely meant instead to suggest the reflexivity of Defoe
!46
and Crusoe. He holds that “’tis reasonable to represent one kind of Imprisonment by another, as
it is to represent any Thing that really exists, by that which exists not” (242).
But what if this imprisonment isn’t simply Crusoe on his island or Defoe in his pillory?
Can we not also speak of language as a prison? I would certainly not be the first. Men much
smarter than me have crafted whole arguments regarding the difficult boundaries implicit to
semiotics. And when our semiotics are expressed formally through our literatures, these
boundaries often solidify themselves through attempts at transgression. If we (rightly) set
Robinson Crusoe on a pedestal above its contemporary compatriots, it is because Defoe—
perhaps unwittingly, certainly out of necessity—performed a linguistic gymnastics which by its
very nature create a crisis of categorization, and which, many years down the road, we solved by
forcefully cleaving literature into those two jails within which we still haven’t found our way out
—fiction and non-fiction.
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5) a sort of lightning rod for an accumulation of atmospheric disturbances
DISCUSSED: Daydream Americana, Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, egregious verbal
outbursts, Donald Barthelme, “Not-Knowing,” QWERTY, “the combinatorial agility of
words, the taste of chocolate, taxidermy, capitalism, W. G. Sebald, F-stop and camera
mechanics, John Berger, a solitary Chinese quail, Rembrandt, Roger Casement,
hybridity, LEGOs, bumper bowling.
According to his former student and biographer Tracy Daugherty, Donald Barthelme
spent the weekends of his early youth crisscrossing southern Texas in a sort of Daydream
Americana:
[Barthelme’s father] drove a Lincoln Zephyr handed down from his father, and later,
white Corvette convertibles with red seats. On weekends, he packed up the family and
took them to Stewart Beach in Galveston, or to his parent’s place on Avenue I, or to his
father’s ranch on the Guadalupe River near San Antonio. Bob Wills and His Texas
Playboys kicked a swing beat through the car’s speakers, a stark contrast to the
symphonic music that was played in the house. Clouds rose like the tops of Stetsons as
the family cruised down Highway 6, past Arcola, Alvin… (23)
I like taking the liberty of exaggerating the impact these outings had on the young Donald
Barthelme, picturing them in all their pastoral mid-century glory, not just for the cinematic
quality of the midday, wind-in-hair, nuclear family drive, but for the swerve of objectively odd
music reportedly playing over the convertible’s speakers. The rigid formal structure of the
symphonies young Barthelme would have been used to at home, with predictable themes
constructed slowly around movements which aggregate over long periods of time, seem outright
glacial and stifling when compared to the music of the Texas Playboys, and especially to the
erratic verbal interruptions of their flamboyant bandleader, Bob Wills.
!48
Pick a song at random, or stick to the classics like “Roly-Poly” or “San Antonio Rose”—
it’s impossible to listen to any portion of the Bob Wills catalog without being yanked from the
moment(um of the song) by Wills’s shocking falsetto exclamations (“ahh-haa”), goading (“go on
and get it…”), and interjections (“won’t be long now…”). Even more than their innovative mix
of genres and instrumentation, the hallmark of Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys was the
egregious verbal outbursts that punctuate the songs in a sort of running meta-commentary that
competes with the rhythm, melodies, and solos as much as it compliments them. Ever the
showman, Wills knew that his audience was held rapt not just as a result of the smooth crooning
and dexterous play of His Texas Playboys, but by the sense that, with him in charge, anything
was liable to happen at any given moment. As the music critic Tom Moon explains,
[On a] sprightly version of Duke Ellington’s “Take the A Train,” recorded for radio
broadcast in the ’40s, [Wills] cuts into an energetic chorus by the electric mandolin player
Tiny Moore to get the band to crank things up a notch. “Let’s straighten out, boys, get
Tiny a little loose.” Right away the drums snap out a tight beat, and Moore, one of the
Texas Playboys’ great soloists, responds with a series of aggressive, rhythmically intense
phrases. The band would likely have reached that zone anyway, but as Wills well knew,
just making the suggestion drew listeners in, made them participants. (868)
I’m reminded a lot of Barthelme’s approach to writing when I listen now almost a century
after he did to Bob Wills’ gregarious voice leap out of the speakers of my gray Toyota Prius, the
windows open to the Pacific Ocean air on Vista del Mar. Both musician and writer are
inordinately concerned with drawing their audience “in” and making them “participants.” For
Wills, this meant populating his songs as if at random with verbal and vocal improvisations that
varied the landscape of the music such that no two performances of the same song were ever
quite the same. This constant variation creates a magnetic tension between musician and
!49
audience, each wondering what the other would do next, and ensured in live settings especially
that the fervor of the crowd could be played by Wills and his entourage as if it was an instrument
in and of itself.
The nature of literature and the written word precludes this tactic for Barthelme. His
medium is not performed in a live setting where improvisation can alter the art from night to
night depending on whim and audience interaction. His is a medium that, once published, persist
as a permanent record for all time. However, this doesn’t mean that a spirit of improvisation isn’t
at the heart of Barthelme’s approach to the writing process. In his seminal essay “Not-Knowing,”
Barthelme makes a strong case that the artist necessarily exists in a perpetual state of problem-
solving that never affords the comfort of complete certainty. The artist—and especially the writer
—is the arbiter of endless possibilities, whose every decision closes as many doors as it opens.
Improvisation arrives in the instance of hovered pen or a blinking cursor, the writer’s fingers
poised inquisitively over a QWERTY keyboard. For Barthelme, that term—“not-knowing”—is
restored from pejorative connotations of ignorance and confusion to a virtuosic tool which the
writer must saddle as if it were a majestic bucking bronco primed for taming. The “writer,” says
Barthleme, “is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do” (11).
In this depiction of the writing process, certainty is antithetical to creation. “The not-
knowing is crucial to art,” he writes, “is what permits art to be made. Without the scanning
process engendered by not-knowing, without the possibility of having the mind move in
unanticipated directions, there would be no invention” (12). The creative economy here prizes
“unanticipated directions” and “invention” above all else, as if that art which truly moves us is
not wholly accessible through the rigamarole of excessive, pedantic planning. Here he is
!50
undercutting not just the obvious targets of plot-driven, clockwork literature like the Victorians,
but rather all writing that ceases to engage first, foremost, and inquisitively with its primary (and
most volatile) commodity—language. (In a comical epistolary aside, Barthelme castigates nearly
every school of prose and poetry, starting with his own—Postmodernism—and continuing
through Structuralism, New Criticism, Existentialism, Phenomenology, Nouveau Roman, the
Anti-Novel, even Altar Poems, before wondering what the New Thing might be—“The New
Newness? Or maybe the Post-New? It’s a problem” [14].) Barthelme argues that not-knowing
manifests most productively in diction, expanding from the idiosyncratic interplay of words
themselves to create new meanings and, only thereafter, plot. A fervid champion of Joyce and
Beckett, Barthelme exalts the “combinatorial agility of words” first before suggesting “the
exponential generation of meaning once they’re allowed to go to bed together” (21). The writer
is “a sort of lightning rod for an accumulation of atmospheric disturbances” (18) who can
capitalize on not-knowing to “surprise himself, [make] art possible, [and reveal] how much of
Being we haven’t yet encountered” (21).
Not-knowing is a homely, modest theory that befits Barthelme’s down-to-earthedness. Its
postulation is perhaps too obvious to be hailed for the elegant genius it contains. It essentially
suggests that, in the right hands, the magic of (poetic) language is powerful enough to expand the
infinite possibility of prose:
We do not mistake the words the taste of chocolate for the taste of chocolate itself, but
neither do we miss the tease in taste, the shock in chocolate. Words have halos, patinas,
overhands, echoes. The word halo, for instance, make invoke St. Hilarius, of whom
we’ve seen too little lately. The word patina brings back the fine pewter shine on the
saint’s halo. The word overhang reminds us that we have, hanging over us, a dinner date
with St. Hilarius, that crashing bore. The word echo restores us to Echo herself, poised
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like the White Rock girl on the overhang of a patina of a halo—infirm ground, we don’t
want the poor spirit to pitch into the pond where Narcissus blooms eternally, they’ll bump
foreheads, or maybe other parts close to the feet, a scandal. There’s chocolate smeared all
over Hilarius’ halo—messy, messy… (“Not-Knowing” 21)
By doubling doggedly down on the minutia of phrasal invention, the writer unmoors his
text from the safety of well-traversed shallows and nudges ever further into uncharted territory.
This is not a mere matter of style. Not-knowing is a means to broadening the possibilities of
literature. The criticism implicit is that those writers who know too perfectly what they wish to
say and how exactly they want to say it will inevitably produce the sort of stillborn text that
arrives in need of resuscitation. “Writing,” he says, “is a process of dealing with not-knowing, a
forcing of what and how” (12). His implication is, of course, good writing.
The writer at her best is in a constant tread of water, following this intuitive current to
that, buoyed by the notion that the invention required of solving one linguistic problem will lead
to the connotative mystery of the next. The text of the essay itself predictably fulfills its own call
to spontaneity, mixing overt criticism with a recurring, improvised tale of Sarah Lawrence
coeducationals, Zeno the chastity-belted Graduate Record Examination thief, and two stodgy art
museum security guards with staunch views on Movements past and present. This concocted,
illustrative tale puts not-knowing on high-wire display alongside the essay’s out-and-out
criticism in fits and starts that recall the Bob Wills of Barthelme’s Texas youth, inviting the
audience (reader) to follow almost in real-time (à la Sophie Calle) where the words might lead
—“What happens next?” wonders Barthelme early on (of Jacqueline, of Jemima, of Zeno, of
writing itself). “Of course, I don’t know” (11).
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Barthelme’s well-articulated defense of a writing process that champions intuitive
happenstance should come as little surprise. His are stories that often turn on a dime and follow
the organic undulations of wordplay to their most fevered pitch. I am thinking of the final
paragraph from “The Phantom of the Opera’s Friend” which reads,
I sit down on the curb, outside the Opera. People passing look at me. I will wait here for a
hundred years. Or until the hot meat of romance is cooled by the dull gravy of common
sense once more. (136)
Or I am thinking of that deadpan double-whammy opening salvo from “Views of My
Father Weeping”: “An aristocrat was riding down the street in his carriage. He ran over my
father” (109). Or the way he describes birds in “Paraguay” as “[f]lights of white meat [that]
moved through the sky overhead in the direction of the dim piles of buildings” (122). These are
sentences whose language makes the common strange again. Which are as precise as they are
unique in their description. Simile, metaphor, dichotomy, metonym, onomatopoeia—the entire
arsenal of linguistic acrobatics is employed in a sort of freewheeling circus of poetic language
that folds and refracts in ways that, like Faulkner or Beckett or Joyce, incant the reader à la
hypnosis. Barthelme’s what is always altered by his how, language constantly diverting and
parlaying and tributary-ing into new plots and logics, and it keeps the reader of his stories in a fit
of bated breath usually reserved for the vaulted tightrope walker.
But for all the pyrotechnics it enables, not-knowing is for Barthelme primarily a practice
privy only to the writer. While the reader may hang on his every word, the perpetual sense of
not-knowing that is intrinsic to the writer is, in some sense, antithetical to the reading process.
The traditional enterprise of reading suggests that we move from confusion to clarity—from not-
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knowing to knowing. The task of the writer, in this arrangement, is to create a text which delivers
us from the anxiety of ignorance to the comforts of enlightenment. This is the tacit contract
between writer and reader such as it has existed for centuries. And because we usually receive a
book in its entirety, it can be difficult to create for the reader the same endless sense of anything-
can-happen that accompanies the writer perched over his keyboard. The decisions are all
accounted for and handed to us in a bound tome. Once a story has been read, it is no longer not-
known, and even its most unanticipated twists, turns, and mysteries come to feel like the
taxidermy of a once-wild animal we’ve hunted in a fever dream.
But what if the endless possibility of Barthelme’s not-knowing characterized not just the
writer but the reader as well? What if not-knowing wasn’t simply a prerequisite of effective
writing, but also of affective reading. Not simply a process of improvised creation but, too, one
of infinite cognition and fathomless comprehension that extended far past the book’s final page?
Could reading pursue fugue states of confusion, dissociation, vacillation, and limbo? What if the
trajectory was a move from certainty towards bewilderment? From knowing to not?
Usually, only a simple form of not-knowing is inherent to the reading process. Though
we can thumb idly through the upcoming pages that we have yet to read, glancing here and there
at words or phrases that might suggest something of plot or character—hinting at what and how
—we are only ever sure of what we have read. Not-knowing, in this case, exists on those as-yet
unread pages, and is destroyed as a result of progression. The more we read of a book, the more
we “know” it, until “THE END” confirms that we have put our ignorance to bed. Seen this way,
the process of reading is a comfort to those partial to the productivity of capitalism. We use the
tool of reading to transform the raw material of written language into a wealth of knowledge. At
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any given point, should we (perhaps) put the book down for a quick drink of water or (perhaps) a
lengthier sojourn to unspecified (sandy) locales for an unspecified duration, we can measure our
progress the placement of our bookmark and the degree of our not-knowing by the pages that
remain. For some, like me, it can even be a violent act to finish a book. So doing eliminates the
endless possibilities afforded the imaginative reader paused in medias res and cedes full control
to the author’s manner of solving the not-knowing for them both. Case closed. Throw away the
key.
In any case, this brand of not-knowing is not very interesting. It is intrinsic to any artistic
consumption. The more we sit with any work of art, the more it reveals itself. This is simply a
function of familiarity and saturation. Though we may, upon second readings or book club
discussions, come to different conclusions on how to interpret certain occurrences within it,
these conflicting conclusions themselves require the sort of tacit agreement on what and how that
by definition extinguish this basic form of not-knowing.
However, there is a higher order of not-knowing available to the reader of certain—let’s
called it estuarial—literature which goes beyond poetic linguistics and beyond even plot. These
are books that float between (non-)fictional modes and create, explore, and perpetuate a deeper
brand of uncertainty that endures far after the reading is complete. And by this I do not mean to
suggest the kind of simple ambiguity of plot or character that can sometimes spawn whole tracts
of criticism hellbent on persuading fellow readers to adopt one interpretation over another (“Is
Benji a reliable narrator?” “What does the green light represent in The Great Gatsby?” Etc.).
The questions that persist this higher register of not-knowing concern source material
itself, and are purposefully slippery, designed to resist resolve. While what and how are as fixed
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and immovable as with any other printed literature, what lurks in the fabric of these books are
questions regarding the relationship of the text to the world itself. Even after a book written in
this mode is read, the reader wonders, “How, exactly, did this book come to be?” and, “Did the
events it describes actually occur?” and, “What relationship does the author have to the book?
Does the book have to the world?” The degree of verisimilitude is at least a subcutaneous
concern of all books, of course. But I speak now of literature that foregrounds this concern, and
purposefully permits and sometimes even encourages ambiguity, second-guessing, and
confusion regarding origin, representation, and artistic license.
I am speaking, for instance, of a book like W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn which
exists in the mysterious nexus created by combining scholarship, first-person narrative, and
photography. To navigate it feels as if you’ve wandered into a sort of literary Bermuda Triangle.
As one interviewer of Sebald commented to him,
I think one of the difficulties we face in trying to describe the book is that in it you seem
to have reinvented the narrative form. In fact, the narrative conceit of the novel seems
virtually invisible, so much so that we are unaware of it as we read. There seems to be no
artificial mechanism, no construct mediating between the reader and the experience of the
page. (Cuomo 93)
This is a common assessment of Sebald’s work. Critics often struggle to describe the
process by which his work sublimates its readers so fully into the fabric of its text that it can, at
times, prove impossible to remember how, for instance, you’ve arrived at a passage about silk
worms or the mass suicide of the Taipingis. The experience does not, however, impart a sense of
being lost, and is more than a function of an aimless stream-of-consciousness which wanders
impulsively. Rather, the lack of any perceptible “artificial mechanism” speaks to the way in
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which Sebald very quickly dissolves the boundaries between the book and the world from which
it emanates, specifically by capitalizing on the innate trust we grant to photographs.
Early in The Rings of Saturn—in fact, on only its second page—Sebald corroborates a
first-person description of a hospital bed vista of Suffolk from which “all that could be seen of
the world…was the colourless patch of sky framed in the window” (4) with a grainy, nondescript
black-and-white photograph of a rectangular window. The small, rectangular photograph is
centered on the page, about three inches tall by two inches wide, and disrupts the flow of text just
after this sentence as if to illustrate the view its first-person narrator recalls. The glass of the
window seems to be the sort latticed with mesh wire, and the light grays it contains show a cloud
reaching up to what would have been an azure sky were it not committed to the stark contrast of
greyscale. The thick, black, nondescript frame which outlines the window is a result of F-stop
and camera mechanics which here are capable only of attenuating to the bright light pouring in
from the outside, obscuring the details of the surround in pitch black. “Several times during the
day,” recounts the narrator, “I felt a desire to assure myself of a reality I feared had vanished
forever by looking out of that hospital window, which, for some strange reason, was draped with
black netting…” (4).
Sebald’s work here and elsewhere displays a constant “desire to assure [us] of a reality
[we] feared had vanished forever.” His books are meant not just to describe reality, but to
confirm it for both writer and reader. These are books that exist not so much as a living
testament, but as a testament to living. The use of photography is central to this endeavor. While
text mediates our lived experience, photography apprehends it in the raw. Commingling his
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narration with photographs which purport to illustrate the scenarios it describes feels at times like
Sebald is a wily, well-seasoned lawyer holding up for us the undeniable proof of an Exhibit A.
Sebald rightly suspects that writing alone can no longer drag the reader over the threshold
of believability, can no longer sublimate the reader fully into the fabric of the text, can no longer
“assure reality.” For the modern reader, the written word alone is riddled with incredulity. We
instinctively question the reliability of our narrators, their memories, their command of the
language—even when those narrators might be ourselves, attempting as it were to cobble words
together that might not transgress the fallible memories we keep of our experiences. As Sebald
told one interviewer, “…the written word is not a true document after all. The photograph is the
true document par excellence. People let themselves be convinced by a photograph” (Scholz
106).
It is worth noting that such a celebrated writer is so vehemently distrustful of the written
word. Worth remembering that his many acclaimed books thrived on the authority of the image.
Sebald’s slippery objectives—truth, reality—are impeded by the writer’s act of transmuting
experience into text. While words may deliberate upon reality, only the relative objectivity of
photographs will “convince” modern readers to accept it, to acquiesce. His stance emphasizes an
abject authority we grant photographs. We treat them as facts. As proof. As data. The art critic
John Berger, in his seminal essay “Understanding a Photograph,” distinguishes photography
from painting, but he may as well have been discussing the difference between photography and
writing as well. “[P]ainting,” he says, like writing,
interprets the world, translating it into its own language. But photography has no
language of its own. One learns to read photographs as one learns to read footprints or
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cardiograms. The language in which photography deals is the language of events. All its
references are external to itself. (26)
The photographs that populate The Rings of Saturn depict a wide array of “events:” “a
solitary Chinese quail, evidently in a state of dementia” (36); a “lighthouse with its shining glass
cabin [which] still caught the last luminous rays that came in from the western horizon” (75); “a
narrow iron bridge [that] crosses the river Blyth where a long time ago ships heavily laden with
wool made their way seaward” (137); “a number of buildings that resembled temples or
pagodas” (236); a picture of Sebald “taken at Ditchingham about ten years ago, on a Saturday
afternoon when the manor house was open to the public in aid of charity” (264). These
photographic interjections arrive with the same jolt of a Bob Wills whistle or a Donald
Barthelme direct address. What initially present as gangly intrusions quickly become a defining
characteristic of a Sebald text.
From the get-go, Sebald presents a symbiotic logic between text and image, the one
confirming the other. We are first told of his lonely view out the hospital window unto Suffolk.
Immediately, we are presented with its visual echo. This corroborative tactic leaves little room
for us to doubt the veracity of either side of the equation. Add to this interplay long, well-
researched diatribes on historically-verifiable figures and artifacts, like Rembrandt’s The
Anatomy Lesson or Roger Casement “who was executed in a London prison in 1916 for high
treason” (The Rings of Saturn 103), and the result is book whose very form contradicts the
“fiction” label imprinted on its back jacket. We gain greater and greater confidence in the fidelity
of the book the further we read, traveling without hiccup or reservation into the associative
pockets of its narrator’s perseverations and trains of thought, interrupted (and bolstered) every so
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often by the images that affirm his account. For Sebald, text “can be verified only through an
image that was taken. Otherwise you think, oh well, that’s yet another extravagance of this
writer, who came up with it, who extends the line of what happens in reality in order to get
something out of a work, with a certain meaningfulness or symbolic value. But these images are
actually there” (Scholz 107).
Sebald here describes an impulse common of contemporary literature to wage war on the
“extravagance” of the writer. An impulse towards veracity. A “hunger for reality” (as David
Shields calls it). It is an attack on the anxiety communicated centuries earlier in Charles Gildon’s
criticism of Defoe for his failure to moralize. “…[T]o render any Fable worthy of being receiv’d
into the Number of those which are truly valuable,” says Gildon, “it must naturally produce in its
Event some useful Moral, either express’d or understood” (2). Since Defoe, there has been a
steady recoil from the artificial symbolism we simultaneously champion in masters of the craft
like Homer or Shakespeare or (more recently) Tolkien. The writer of fabrication, seen in this
light, is cast as a didactic manipulator who “extends” reality into places simply to suit a moral or
virtue. This brand of hackneyed fabrication performs a violent blunting of reality that shapes it to
instruct and/or enlighten.
Sebald, on the attack, wields photography as his weapon of choice. The use of images
confronts fabrication head-on. When he suggests that “these images are actually there,” he means
it literally. Given the nature of the (analog) photographic process, we are assured that what is
contained within the photograph exists (or has existed at some point) in the real world. “Every
photograph,” says Berger, “is in fact a means of testing, confirming, and constructing a total
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view of reality” (27). The photographic process, in this case, negates the “extravagance” of
fabrication and suggests a tamper-free text which is faithful to an objective reality.
And yet, Sebald has often and at great length described the spurious nature of the
photographs that populate his books. Borrowing from an interview in The Paris Review, the
scholar Adrian Daub has pointed out that
[a]lthough Sebald claimed that “90 percent” of the pictures he used in his novels were
“authentic,” he also insisted that “the idea is to make it seem factual, though some of it
may be invented.” […] And while in interviews Sebald was at times cagey on the topic of
referentiality of pictures, acquaintances report that in personal conversation he was quite
willing to admit that “it mattered little what the pictures depicted.” Moreover, Sebald not
only used his acquaintances to obtain pictures, but would collect their family snapshots as
well. (311)
This suggests that Sebald isn’t simply reacting to and against fabrication, but rather
complicating it. There are no attributions or captions for Sebald’s photographs. No index or
citations, even for pages seemingly xeroxed from diaries, ledgers, or letters. We cannot, as it
were, trace the images back to their referent or origin. They are co-opted. Recycled. Repurposed.
Daub goes as far as to “call many of Sebald’s photographs simulacra—their referents are
destabilized or eclipsed to an extent that within the semiotic structure of their text they ‘point’ to
no specific external reality at all” (311). All of which gives Sebald the freedom to maneuver his
books into the estuary between invention and fact without calling attention to their hybridity. The
destabilization of images in turn destabilizes the text, and creates for the reader a
discombobulated reading experience that accrues with each additional sentence, each additional
image.
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Here, of course, is where terms like “(non-)fiction” are thrown to readers of estuarial
literature like a life vest ushering them back to well-trod ground. By declaring a book like
Sebald’s “fiction,” it is robbed of its full power to preserve a reader’s not-knowing. Both terms
de-prioritize the difficult question of origin such that readers are encouraged not to contend with
it in the first place. These modalities are innocently affixed to the back cover of most book
jackets like wolves in sheep’s clothing. They remind me of training wheels. Or bumper bowling.
Like the colorful pamphlet of directions that accompanies an intricate set of LEGOs. Those same
bricks (books) sold unencumbered will yield results as myriad as the hands that build (read)
them. But, given a rigid set of directions, we are deprived of the imaginative flexibility needed to
swim out between the poles. The directions that bully us into the skyscraper constrict hands that
might otherwise construct the jumbo jet which threatens it.
It is the same with the bipolar categorization of our literature. Those seemingly-innocent
terms affixed to the upper left corner of the back cover suggests that the contents of its jacket are
either faithful representations of occurred events, or invented whole-cloth by their author. And
while we take for granted that even fictional books use occurrences of the world as a jumping-off
point, and that non-fictional books are subject to instances of creative license, these bipolar
modalities castrate the mystery of conception. Much like a magician explaining his tricks, these
categories nullify the tension created by the delicate interplay of Sebald’s text and images. In the
high stakes, one-drop, all-or-nothing standard within modern literature, event the hint of
authorial “extravagance” is enough to render The Rings of Saturn as a fiction. When clearly it is
not.
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But confusion matters. Difficulty is important. Barthelme’s sense of not-knowing is
imperative not just to creation but to reception. He reminds us that art
is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult, but because it wishes to be art. However
much the writer might long to be, in his work, simple, honest, and straightforward, these
virtues are no longer available to him. He discovers that in being simple, honest, and
straightforward, nothing much happens: he speaks the speakable, whereas what we are
looking for is the as-yet unspeakable, the as-yet unspoken. (15)
We yearn for art that disorients us. We are ready for literature to stagger us. And we seek
a reading experience that renders our world as uncertain as living in it is. But how?
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6) Simply an unconventional, generally melancholy though sometimes even playful
now-ending read
DISCUSSED: literary tightrope, alchemy, Jackson Pollock, Jack Kerouac, Dante,
Euripides, Sylvia Plath, Eddie Poe, John Kennedy Toole, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Sir
Philip Sidney, Verdi, New-Newness, ersatz prose alternative to The Waste Land, the
Egyptian Book of the Dead.
There is no reader as proficient in not-knowing as David Markson. For, while most of his
obituaries refer to him as some permutation of “experimental US novelist” (Dempsey), I think
we might more appropriately think of him as our best experimental American reader. This is
meant as no sleight. I say this with reverence. I say this with awe. His singular ability to
transform his reading life into magnetic, captivating writing is unparalleled, and gives rise to a
genre of book that defies the tidy fictional categorization imposed upon it.
Beginning with the oft celebrated Wittgenstein’ s Mistress, his oeuvre is a monument to
attentive, enthusiastic, thoughtful, and wide-ranging reading which culminated in a final laconic
quartet of “novel[s] with no intimation of story whatsoever” (Markson, This Is Not a Novel 6).
Comprised almost entirely of quotes, quips, anecdotes, factoids, commentary, here-say, rumors,
legends, pensées, aphorisms, epigrams, and epigraphs lifted from Markson’s intimidatingly
exhaustive reading life, Reader’s Block (1996), This Is Not a Novel (2001), Vanishing Point
(2004), and The Last Novel (2007) redefine the author’s task by forcefully refusing to “[make] up
stories” nor “[invent] characters” (Markson, This Is Not a Novel 1). The epigraph to Reader’s
Block is quoted from Borges, and sets the tone for the work to follow: “First and foremost,” it
reads, “I consider myself a reader.” Instead of writing, per se, Markson operates as the literary
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equivalent of both an orchestral conductor and hip-hop DJ, arranging borrowed material which
samples the life, times, and writing of historical figures into a meditation on the tenuous
relationship between art and death. As one obituary suggests, these books “all walk a literary
tightrope, without the usual safety nets of plot and character development, yet through some
form of alchemy are compelling and oddly haunting” (Dempsey).
The “alchemy” is not simply a result of Markson’s considerable curatorial prowess—
though, on its own, the assortment of second-hand material that comprises the lump sum of these
books fosters an imposing, monolithic weight. Markson presents text that perseverates so
relentlessly on the shortcomings of artistic livelihood that it is impossible at turns to read it as
anything other than self-flagellation, anything other than a thesis whose primary purpose is to
dissuade its reader from following in the artistic footsteps that spawned it. “Jackson Pollock once
held a job cleaning bird droppings from statues in New York parks” (Reader’s Block 93)
Markson tells us. Or, “Jack Kerouac lived with his mother for most of the last twenty yers of his
life” (Reader’s Block 119). Or, “This book on which I have grown thin through all these years,
Dante speaks of” (Vanishing Point 133). Art has ravished these practitioners. The lives that
surround their masterworks are harrowing and, often, tragic. Rarely relayed is the triumph. Even
rarer is depicted joy. Instead, these are books rife with unraveling, depression, travesty, the
spotlight illuminating the jaundice and consumption and alcoholism and parental neglect and
suicides of our Sylvia Plaths and “Eddie” Poes (This Is Not a Novel 121) and Euripides.
Markson’s terse and well-chiseled prose parades an onslaught of regrettable similarities that
unify the artist figure into an interchangeable throng of steady, predictable misfortune:
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Augusta Leigh died in poverty.
Ouida died in poverty.
Mary Webb died in poverty.
Jane Avril died in poverty.
Jane Avril. (This Is Not a Novel 153)
The implication, of course, is that Markson will die an artist in poverty, too. That these
books are, in a sense, his coping mechanism—a “verbal fugue” (This Is Not a Novel 170).
Thematic uniformity goes a long way in Markson’s later work to establish his presence
through curation, as if he were a reticent ghost in the machine. The litany of death that marches
through these books is incessant, and the preoccupation fills the narrative void traditional
storytelling usually occupies. In lieu of plot and character, the recurring list of one-line obituaries
achieves a momentum that begins to evoke its compiler much like a mixtape comes to depict its
lovers or a yard-sale defines its hoarder. “John Kennedy Toole committed suicide by running a
hose from his exhaust pipe into his car” (Reader’s Block 135). “Jean-Michel Basquiat died of a
heroin overdose. At twenty-seven” (The Last Novel 99). “Sir Philip Sidney died of a sword
wound in the thigh” (This Is Not a Novel 176). The facts contained within these sentences can be
cross-referenced and corroborated by histories, biographies, newspaper clippings, and
repositories of internet information, and they imbue the manuscript with a heightened gravitas
fiction struggles to amass. We come across the flotsam of a well-known death, and it humanizes
the deceased: “Verdi’s funeral—which according to his own wishes was conducted without
music. Verdi’s” (The Last Novel 183). We are humbled by the pedestrian demise of our most
cherished luminaries: “Chet Baker died on a sidewalk in Amsterdam. Almost surely from
drugs” (Vanishing Point 124). And sometimes death even performs with a flare for the uncanny:
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Prokofiev died on the same day as Stalin.
Aldous Huxley died on the same day as John F. Kennedy.
Nathanael West died one day after F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Hemingway died one day after Louis-Ferdinand Céline. (This Is Not a Novel 74)
As the death toll climbs, the particulars of each real world example become less
important than what Markson’s incessant perseveration suggests about his own imminent, real-
life, flesh-and-bone fate. Each additional (literal) death sentence suggests a man coming to terms
with his own impending mortality, as if he is living in a hall of funereal mirrors, and inevitably
draws Markson, as the text’s reader-cum-writer, headlong into its stakes. We increasingly
wonder, Why is this man—this fellow artist—so preoccupied with death? and What (tragic) fate
has befallen its creator? Though Markson works hard to void his text of invented characters,
death itself achieves an omnipresence that verges on personification, and Markson becomes its
most obvious target.
In each book, Markson offers us a generic surrogate to stand in his stead. He becomes
“Reader” in Reader’s Block; “Writer” in This Is Not a Novel; “Author” in Vanishing Point; and
“Novelist” in The Last Novel. Other than the glut of quoted and second-hand, reported material,
we are only ever afforded sporadic sentences that detail the inner turmoil and mindset of these
generic scribes. But it exactly these interruptions that cause his work to defy categorization.
Much like Bob Wills’ interjections and Sebald’s black-and-white photographs, these self-
referential sentences erupt in the text just as you begin to forget they exist. They are threaded
between the quotations as a sort of glue that never lets us stray too far away from the notion that
the quotes we read have been chosen and arranged purposefully by a human being who has read
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them elsewhere and compiled them purposefully for our consumption. These four books are not
merely reference materials. They are no mere collections of quotations to peruse for graduation
cards. Nor, as Markson adamantly declares, are they “novels.” Instead, they represent “Novelist’s
personal genre. In which part of the experiment is to continue keeping him offstage to the
greatest extent possible—while compelling the attentive reader to perhaps catch his breath when
things achieve an ending nonetheless” (The Last Novel 175).
In fact, the primary concern of these interjections is to define what, exactly, Markson’s
“personal genre” is. “Writer is pretty much tempted to quit writing” begins This Is Not a Novel.
“Writer is weary unto death of making up stories” (1). These interjections read as inner
monologues uttered out loud, as if we are eavesdropping on a madman genius muttering to
himself in the subway seat next to us. Transparency of Markson’s confused process of not-
knowing is achieved, and the persistent question of genre assumes the role plot would otherwise
fill. The plot of the book becomes, in large part, an attempt to define its form. What is this? we
wonder alongside its author.
Indeed, redacted of all but those lines pertaining to “Writer,” This Is Not a Novel reads
something like a manifesto of Barthelme’s “New-Newness”—a train of thought that wonders
what else writing can be when it inhabits the murky estuary between research and personal
essay; between reading and writing; between fiction and non-. The essential narrative that
emerges without the accoutrement of culled secondary sources reveals an anxiety common to
claustrophobic writers hemmed in by generic poles. As with other writers occupying the estuary
between, Markson is actively leaning on his medium, nudging it into forms that feel awkward
because they are without precedent. So that while the emotional locus of This Is Not a Novel
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centers on mortality, it self-consciously stutters through a semantic predicament to define for the
reader exactly how to interpret an unorthodox, plot-less, murky form which “seduces the reader
into turning pages nonetheless” (3). This anxiety comes clearly to the fore when we remove the
extracurricular examples that constitute the bulk of the book and focus just on those self-
referential lines penned by Markson/“Writer:”
Writer is pretty much tempted to quit writing. (1)
Writer is weary unto death of making up stories. (1)
Writer is equally tired of inventing characters. (1)
A novel with no intimation of story whatsoever, Writer would like to contrive. (2)
And with no characters. None. (2)
Plotless. Characterless. (3)
Yet seducing the reader into turning pages nonetheless. (3)
Actionless, Writer wants it. (4)
Which is to say, with no sequence of events. (4)
Which is to say, with no indicated passage of time. (4)
Then again, getting somewhere in spite of this. (4)
Indeed, with a beginning, middle, and an end. (4)
Even with a note of sadness at the end. (4)
A novel with no setting. (5)
With no so-called furniture. (5)
Ergo meaning finally without descriptions. (5)
A novel with no overriding central motivations, Writer wants. (6)
Hence with no conflicts and/or confrontations, similarly. (6)
With no social themes, i.e., no picture of society. (7)
No depiction of contemporary manners and/or morals. (7)
Categorically, with no politics. (7)
A novel entirely without symbols. (8)
Ultimately, a work of art without even a subject, Writer wants. (9)
Is Writer [sane], thinking he can bring off what he has in mind? (11)
And anticipating that he will have any readers? (11)
Does Writer even exist? (12)
In a book without characters? (12)
Obviously Writer exists. (13)
Not being a character but the author, here. (13)
Writer is writing, for heaven’s sake. (13)
Which is to say that Writer can even have headaches, then? (14)
Writer can have headaches. (14)
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Writer does have headaches. (15)
This is a novel if Writer or Robert Rauschenberg says so. (18)
This is even an epic poem, if Writer says so. (21)
Requiring no one’s corroboration. (21)
Also even a sequence of cantos awaiting numbering, if Writer says so. (23)
For that matter Writer also has backaches. (26)
This is even a mural of sorts, if Writer says so. (36)
Xanadu. Kubla Khan. Writer’s tendency to misremember that they actually did exist.
(37)
Your last novel was a flop. You've got two wonderful children depending on you.
Don’t you think it's time to consider doing something more financially responsible in
your life? (53)
This is also even an autobiography, if Writer says so. (53)
Realizing idly that every artist in history—until Writer’s own century—rode
horseback. (57)
Writer’s equally idle realization that all of those same equestrian artificers likewise
went through life without flush toilets. (58)
This is also a continued heap of riddles, if Writer says so. (70)
Or even a polyphonic opera of a kind, if Writer says that too. (73)
Writer is sitting. (81)
Writer sometimes also talks to himself. (81)
Writer sitting and/or talking to himself being no more than renewed verification that he
exists. (82)
In a book without characters. (82)
As noted, not being a character but the author, here. (82)
Even with innumerable obvious likes and/or dislikes and certain self-evident
preoccupations. (82)
This is even a disquisition on maladies of the life of art, if Writer says so. (86)
Or an ersatz prose alternative to The Waste Land, if Writer so suggests. (101)
Or a treatise on the nature of man, if Writer so labels it. (111)
An anthology of extraordinary suicide notes. (119)
Or of any suicide notes. Is there such? (119)
Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage. (128)
Self evident enough to scarcely need Writer’s say-so. (128)
Obstinately cross-referential and of cryptic interconnective syntax. (128)
Here perhaps less than self-evident to the lass than attentive. (128)
Writer’s arse. (130)
Writer talking to himself again. (133)
Or a contemporary variant on the [the Egyptian Book of the Dead], if Writer says so.
(147)
Writer incidentally doing his best here—insofar as his memory allows—not to repeat
things he has included in his earlier work. (147)
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Meaning in this instance the four hundred and fifty or more deaths that were
mentioned in his last book also. (147)
Your last novel was a flop. (147)
All of this preoccupation implying little more, presumably, than that Writer is turning
older. (147)
Daydreaming of a MacArthur Foundation award. (152)
Writer talking to himself yet another time. (152)
Talkative, outgoing, inquisitive, formidably erudite, and sharp. (152)
Writer has actually written some relatively traditional novels. Why is he spending his
time doing this sort of thing? (164)
That’s why. (164)
This is also a kind of verbal fugue, if Writer says so. (170)
If still perhaps less than self-evident to the less than attentive. (170)
In a dramatic, not a narrative form; with incidents arousing pity and terror. (171)
Nonetheless this is also in many ways even a classic tragedy, if Writer says so. (171)
Or on the other end of the scale even a volume entitled Writer’s Block—which Writer
is willing to wager some petulant soul will have it. (173)
Does Writer still have headaches? And/or backaches? (178)
As from the start, affording no more than a renewed verification that he exists. (178)
Not being a character but the author, here. (178)
Turning older or no. (178)
Writer is writing, is all. Still. (178)
Also there is Writer’s tendonitis. (180)
Likewise again merely serving to ratify his existence. (180)
Likewise Writer’s pinched nerve. (182)
Or yet again, Writer’s sciatica. (184)
Or sometimes of course even a comedy of a sort, if Writer says so. (184)
Or even his synthetic personal Finnegans Wake, if Writer so decides. (185)
If only by way of fitting no other category anyone might suggest. (185)
Writer’s silent heart attack. (186)
Writer’s right-lung lobectomy and resected ribs. (188)
Or was it possibly nothing more than a fundamentally recognizable genre all the while,
no matter what Writer averred? (189)
Nothing more or less than a read? (189)
Simply an unconventional, generally melancholy though sometimes even playful now-
ending read? (189)
About an old man’s preoccupations. (189)
Writer’s cancer. (190)
Farewell and be kind. (190)
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Presented in this manner, This Is Not a Novel certainly puts on full display its debt to the
“novel” form it denies. There are characters. There is a plot with definite arc, albeit narrow and
solemn in focus. What begins as a cantankerous artistic manifesto gives way to a poignant
depiction of the lonely (old) artist talking to himself before ultimately arriving at the bare facts of
heart attack, lobectomy, resected ribs, and cancer. These sobering diagnoses reverberate with the
litany of prominent deaths they accompany, and answer finally for the reader why, exactly,
Writer is so preoccupied with mortality. That in real life the writer David Markson suffered from
these same ailments that Writer does creates the sort of estuarial moment that dislodges these
final four books from fictional shores. This is not a fictional character whose life will continue on
in the imagination of his readers. Cancer is not deployed to nature the book’s final page with
opportunistic pathos. This is the work of a flesh-and-blood man knocking on the doorstep of
death. These last four books are his last public testament.
Markson struggles with what to call This Is Not a Novel and the other three books like it.
He refers to it as a “novel” (5), a “work of art” (9), a “book” (12), an “epic poem” (21), a
“sequence of cantos” (23), a “mural of sorts” (36), an “autobiography” (53), a “continued heap of
riddles” (70), a “polyphonic opera” (73), a “disquisition on maladies” (86), an “ersatz prose
alternative to The Waste Land” (101), a “treatise on the nature of man” (111), an “anthology of
extraordinary suicide notes” (119), an “assemblage” (128), a “contemporary variant on the
Egyptian Book of the Dead” (147), a “verbal fugue” (170), a “classic tragedy” (171), a “comedy
of a sort” (184), his “synthetic personal Finnegans Wake” (185), and an “unconventional,
generally melancholy though sometimes even playful now-ending read” (189). This performed
not-knowing is important for two reasons. In the first place, it suggests that extent genres fail to
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sufficiently account for Markson’s work. These books fit all and none of those descriptions at the
same time, but, in any case, should not be hamstrung with the rote designation of “fiction” with
which they are officially anointed. To call them such does is injustice not simply of
classification, but, too, of ambition.
This is because Markson’s ultimately futile search for generic similarity profoundly
informs the artist’s process. Like other authors who wade into the estuary, Markson’s writing
process deals head-on with (literally) locating his work amidst the larger framework of the
literary canon. Where do I fit in? he seems to be wondering, between quotes by Pasternak and
Spinoza. As one reporter who visited Markson late in his life noted,
When we visited Markson in New York, The Last Novel, as it would be called and as it
would be for him, was nearly complete. Markson indicated some index cards neatly
arranged in two shoebox lids. That was the book. He couldn’t tell me the title, for
superstitious reasons, but it was, he promised, a good one. I stood up to look at the cards
from a respectful distance. Red cards were stuck in between the rest. Bookmarks, I
supposed. Maybe for sections he was yet revising. The red cards, Markson said, are when
my narrator makes some appearance. I saw very few red cards. (Maliszweski)
For the aging Markson—alone, dying, finagling books out of index cards and shoeboxes
—fiction no longer sufficed. Nor was he interested in the self-aggrandizing of autobiography.
Reading these final four books feels more like a personal tour of Markson’s (well-read, highly
erudite, yet still somehow ordinary) inner monologue. To witness him rage against the confines
of contemporary genre over the course of four books, however, reminds me of the
thoroughbred’s squeal when he enters the starting gate. While these books are as much a reaction
to the narrow confinements of a literature addicted to binarism, I wonder what Markson would
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have written in a habitat liberated by the term “prose”—what kinds of “reads” he would have
been more free to write.
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7) Grocery Shopping in Kayenta
DISCUSSED: Supermarket Sweep, Blue Bird enriched flour, high school reunion,
Monument Valley, geo-pornographic hoodoos, Ford Fiesta, Everett Ruess, Nemo, Amy
Hempel, ubiquitous legalese, the hippocampus, Scene Construction Theory, ocotillos, the
Navajo Code Talkers Museum.
The evening crowd at the Bashas’ Diné supermarket in Kayenta, Arizona shops for its
groceries in a most peculiar manner. At sunset, which is perennially draped in the types of high
desert purples and oranges that perform so well on postcards, families arrive en masse as if
responding to the clang of a town-wide dinner bell. They come packed tight into vehicles that
function with the authority of medieval family crests: ’85 Cutlass Supremes swerving around a
gauntlet of potholes, and growling pick-up trucks stippled with the ubiquitous dried red clay that
pervades this part of the American Southwest like a definition. The extraordinary influx of
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Figure 7
evening shoppers that gluts the supermarket at dusk in Kayenta has lead the residents there to
reimagine typical grocery shopping protocols which have, apparently, failed them.
In an effort to streamline their visit with a sort of two-birds-one-stone approach, families
split up into two distinct factions the moment they cross the threshold of the lethargic automated
doorway. Parents enter and push their wobbly carts into the shortest checkout line without taking
even a cursory trip around the store. Meanwhile, their cart-less children perform a mad dash
through the ribcage of aisles in a scene stolen straight from Supermarket Sweep, their sneakers
squeaking in time with the incessant bleat of the UPC scanners. Into the basket they toss swaying
structures of store-brand mac and cheese, Tetra Pak gallons of 2% milk, and regional staples, like
20-pound bags of Blue Bird enriched flour and bottles of Mrs. Klein’s brand chamoyada-flavored
sno-cone syrup, pausing just long enough back at the cart for their parents to assign them a new
item to retrieve.
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Figure 8 Figure 9
It is easy to be won over by the efficient division of labor of these shopping habits. But it
is not without its drawbacks. Inevitably, a child will, as they dash past the glinting wrappers of
ripoff Ding Dongs, or the gooey filling of cherry cheese Danishes, snag from the shelf an item
not theretofore sanctioned by parents, an item with inroads to pleasant sense memories which
promises via slogans and bright packaging and artificial flavoring to transform the monotonous
dinner table into an island of indulgence.
You can see on the faces of these children as they grab for their favored contraband that
specific variety of joy that accompanies those still young enough to believe in the transformative
magic of cheese puffs. They sandwich the illicit treats between official, requested goods, and
march back towards their parents with the dream of well-sated tastebuds. Inevitably, though, they
are found out. Parents keep a hawk’s eye on the parade of conveyed items, and return
unrequested to the reluctant palm of the already-sulking child who is scolded without remorse,
turned around—sometimes forcibly—and sent off in a walk of shame to restock what only
moments before seemed their certain edible destiny.
I had come to Kayenta with my future wife. We were headed, symbolically, into virgin
territory. Ours was a mission common to the newly in-love who yearn desperately to stake their
feelings into a legitimized foundation of shared secrets and exclusive experiences untainted by
the smear of prior relationships. We were days-deep into a loosely-defined route through the
heart of desert which we had embarked upon as an affordable way to concede once-and-for-all
that the ten-year high school reunion we had both so patently mocked, and only half-heartedly
attended, had turned us, albeit begrudgingly and with considerable embarrassment, into a real-
life rom-com.
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Our trip was also an affordable way to mark the occasion of our joint heave-ho back into
the increasingly perilous world of higher education. There was something in the vast, empty,
bleak landscape that seemed apropos of our immediate future, regardless of our enthusiasm for it.
And though it took some coaxing on my part, we eventually opted for an improvised route
anchored only tentatively by colorfully-named destinations like Horseshoe Bend, the Very Large
Array, and Marfa, Texas. The arteries of the southwestern highway system wended their way
through such a vast constellation of novel roadside attractions that any strict itinerary seemed
superfluous. We forwent predestination and set out, instead, with a hearty spirit of come-what-
may which allowed spur-of-the-moment detours to places like Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park
and, after a few days traipsing through The Narrows of Zion National Park, the primordial
geological formations just north of Kayenta, Arizona.
Kayenta lies in the far northeast quadrant of Arizona, about an hours drive from Four
Corners and deep in what is now known as Navajo Nation, high on the Colorado Plateau at the
intersection of highways 160 and 163. It is the southern gateway to a 91,696-acre stretch of
picturesque, mesa-rich land called Monument Valley, popularized in Western culture first by a
proliferation of John-Ford-directed motion pictures, and more recently by a steady stream of car
commercials invoking the magnetism of the (very) open road. The earth here is mostly flat and
endless, but erupts dramatically into islands of monolithic red buttes and geo-pornographic
hoodoos. These formations are anointed with the type of pictographic nomenclature—East
Mitten, for instance—which undersell their ability to swerve gawking tourists back and forth
over the center divider. It is the kind of mythic scenery which lead the indigenous peoples who
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once lived here to assert for centuries that the area is the cradle of all life, and its massive bluffs
and outcroppings the physical evidence of a pantheistic war between gods.
Highway 163 bisects the valley like an asphalt zipper. We drove it slowly. Stared out of
the windshield. Scoffed in awe through our noses. Between us was bag of shelled pistachios.
Before us, less than a mile in the distance, was Sentinel Mesa, a thick slab of rock towering
impossibly high against a pristine gradient of blue sky. In the other direction was The Three
Sisters, a trio of thick, jagged spires held in relief against a nest of auburn clouds. "It's so rare for
things to actually live up to the hype," I said, scoffing through my nose. My future wife didn't
say anything. I could sense her eyes darting every which way through the windshield. Smiling,
we got out of our rented Ford Fiesta and set the timer function on the digital camera to document
our arrival at the womb of the known world.
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Figure 10
It is the magnetic beauty of this land in particular that seized Everett Ruess, a headstrong,
precocious boy from Los Angeles filled with wanderlust, who, in 1934, at the tender age of
twenty, set off from Kayenta on what was to be the last of his five solitary, extended annual
journeys into the rugged, unforgiving wilderness of the American West and Southwest. “You
have no idea how flabby and pale the city is,” he wrote in a 1931 letter home to his parents,
“compared with the reality, the meaningful beauty, of the wilderness” (Roberts 112).
The cult that has sprung up around Ruess celebrates him as the heir-apparent to men like
Thoreau, Whitman, and Muir. We know Ruess best through his poignant journals and earnest
letters home, and through a smattering of watercolor paintings, photographs, and woodcuts he
made during his vagabondage. Ruess made explicit pilgrimages to the leading artists of his time,
knocking unannounced—though later welcomed—at the door of Edward Weston, Ansel Adams,
and Dorothea Lange.
It is easy to be swooned by the romantic vision of Ruess’s journeys. At seventeen, when
he convinced his parents to fund his first hitchhike into the desert, Ruess was a backpacking
novice with little in the way of survival training. And yet, he traveled on foot, with two ragged
burros, for hundreds of miles, into tribal lands rarely traversed by Anglo-westerners, sleeping
under the stars, or stowing away in abandoned Navajo hogans, dropping out of ULCA after one
semester, but reading The Magic Mountain and Arabian Nights and singing Dvorak and
Beethoven melodies in the shade of desert pines, all the while falling under the formidable spell
of the vast, unspoiled land he was eating up in lonesome gulps: “I have been thinking more and
more that I shall always be a lone wanderer of the wildernesses,” he wrote in a letter to his
brother, Waldo. “God, how the trail lures me. You cannot comprehend its resistless fascination
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for me…I’ll never stop wandering. And when the time comes to die, I’ll find the wildest,
loneliest, most desolate spot there is” (Rusho 78).
Wherever it is that Everett Ruess did die, it was so lonely and desolate that in 81 years,
no one has ever found it.
Some six months after Ruess set off from Kayenta in 1934, he headed away from the
small Mormon town of Escalante toward a gulch now flooded by Lake Powell damming and was
never seen again. Because the land was so remote, and because Ruess was by then thought to be
an able camper, it was months before panic set in for Christopher and Stella Ruess. The search
party their worry mobilized turned up only Ruess’s burros—Granny and Chocolatero—
purposefully corralled, and a mysterious etching which has suggested to many that Ruess was
not, as was assumed, killed by a slip off one of the sheer cliffs, or by violent cattle rustlers
known to frequent the area, but rather that he faded away into “Nemo”—the Latin for “no one,”
which Ruess certainly knew, the Jules Verne character being one he closely identified with. This
theory imagined Ruess turning his back on western society, and drifting elliptically away into
wedlock with a young Navajo woman.
In newspaper photographs taken during this limbo, you can see the pain of wishful
thinking in his parents’ eyes. It is painful for parents to bury their children not simply because it
violates the natural chronology of mortality, but because when they bury their children they may
not also bury the proleptic thoughts they have about him—the college degree he will obtain, the
grandchildren he will raise. These anticipatory thoughts persist, and ache with the same pang as
nostalgia. Almost immediately after his disappearance, Christopher and Stella Ruess began
collecting Everett’s writing and artwork for publication. They hired swindlers and con-artists
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who convinced them they were close to bringing Everett home. And they wrote to newspapers all
over the Southwest, hoping that Everett, or someone who knew Everett, would see: “Tell him we
often see him in our dreams, that he is in our words daily, that his watercolors are on the walls,
that many of his friends write to us, but that if he wishes to reveal himself to us and not to them,
it shall be as he desires” (Roberts 225).
This notion of proleptic nostalgia—a tender longing for imagined events which have not
yet come to pass—was one I had encountered before, and one I had, because I am the type to
stumble my way through pillow talk, read to my (incredulous) future wife in a Travelodge near
Carlsbad Caverns later on our voyage, as if a story about a car crash which horribly maims a
beautiful young woman is a good surrogate for a post-coital cigarette.
About halfway through Amy Hempel’s short story “The Harvest,” just after the clean
whitespace of the fourth section break, the unnamed, highly-confessional first-person narrator
explains, flatly, “I leave a lot out when I tell the truth. The same when I write a story. I’m going
to start now to tell you what I left out of ‘The Harvest,’ and maybe begin to wonder why I had to
leave it out” (The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel 106). It is a curious announcement to put in
the middle of a work of “fiction,” and underscores the surprise we feel not that part of the story is
true, but that any of it might, in fact, be made-up. Hempel, in writing these lines, assumes that
we’ve believed in the veracity of all that has preceded them, and if you are anything like me, she
has assumed correctly. But with these throat-clearing lines, Hempel shifts to a kind of running
commentary, like the director’s cut of a DVD, shedding light on the gap between the lives we
lead and the stories they lead to. It is a major—if also unheralded—moment in our contemporary
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literature, creating with three declarative sentences the sort of complex, destabilizing art which
so rarely graces the modern page.
What follows is a near total revision of the story which precedes. “There was no other
car,” states the narrator. “There was only the one car, the one that hit me when I was on the back
of the man’s motorcycle” (107). What begins as an apology for aesthetic values—“But think of
the awkward syllables when you have to say motorcycle” (107)—bleeds into a frank discussion
of believability and the contract between the writer and reader: “But when you thought he had a
wife, wasn’t I liable to do anything? And didn’t I have it coming?” (108); “I would have written
this next part into the story if anybody would have believed it. But who would have? I was there
and I didn’t believe it” (108).
These admissions solidify the narrative situation: an author-cum-narrator is
retrospectively telling us competing versions of an episode in her life from some point later
(“now”) after she has had time to assess the episode’s impact on her life. Because Hempel admits
to the counter-factuality of the first half of her “fictional” story, it creates within the reader a
stronger faith in the fidelity of the story’s second half. This highlights just how effectively
Hempel has conflated author with narrator, how subtly she has woven those siamese storytellers
into a helix that codes her work—generally, and this story in particular—with the DNA of non-
fiction. When Hempel states, “In the emergency room, what happened to one of my legs required
not four hundred stitches but just over three hundred stitches” (107), the counterintuitive effect is
to strengthen our belief in the veracity of our newly-but-once-not-so-honest narrator.
At its core, “The Harvest” lays bare the vexing relationship between memory and
storytelling. Hempel makes transparent the revisions to the past we make subconsciously, and the
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conscious exaggerations we depend on to buoy our storytelling anxieties. But should it be that
these alterations necessarily code our literature as “fiction?” Because the first half of “The
Harvest” led me to believe things that were not entirely factual, does it necessarily invalidate the
story’s greater debt to truth-of-experience? Or could it be that her candid transparency is
ultimately the greater takeaway—that mistakes, discrepancies, deceptions, alterations and the
like pervade literature of any genre, fiction or otherwise? In other words, just because the
copyright page of The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel states in that ubiquitous legalese that
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are
products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual
events or locales or person, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. (The Collected Stories
of Amy Hempel)
does not mean that I read these stories that way. Instead, I read Hempel’s work as an explosion of
memories, a kaleidoscope of episodes and impressions suffused with invention and linguistic
contortions—the kind of reshuffling of life that may be as unfaithful to facts as it is wedded to
the truth of experience.
In fact, what we are beginning to learn about our brain is that the process by which we
remember, invent, and project into the future increasingly seem linked. When we are nostalgic,
we feel a melancholic longing for an event which possesses a concrete physicality in our past,
and which we conceptualize has been imprinted onto our memory in our brain. But when this
nostalgia is for imagined events—literary or otherwise—which have not, nor will ever, take
place, it is more difficult to link the metaphysical with the physical. This discrepancy in concrete
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reality is one major reason we are so stubbornly attached to terms like (non-)fiction. If it did not
occur physically, we are swift to declare it imaginary.
One possible solution lies in the work of neuroscientists Eleanor A. Maguire and Sinéad
L. Mullally of the University College London whose Scene Construction Theory (SCT) suggests
that, at least as far as the brain is concerned, the processes of creating episodic memories and
projecting into the future may be inextricably linked. Their work focuses mainly on the
hippocampus which, for many years, was thought to “house” episodic memories. But in recent
years, studies done with taxi drivers both with and without hippocampal damage show that the
hippocampus has functioned less as a lockbox for storing past occurrences and more as an organ
which mitigates spatial orientation. As the scientists explain, “Scene construction theory
contends that episodic memory, navigation, imagining fictitious scenes, and imagining the future
encompass many processes that are not the primary concern of the hippocampus. Nevertheless, it
proposes that they each rely on the hippocampus for a critical component, which is the
construction of spatially coherent scenes” (227). Because each of these processes must be
situated in physical space, they create similar dendritic circuits through the hippocampus,
regardless of their disparate orientation to time, truth, or reality. Memories, inventions, and
projections into the future all share a physical home—albeit it a microscopic one—within the
dendrites of the brain.
It’s no coincidence that the mirage is a phenomena produced by the desert. It does not
care about would-be poets or their poetry. It is far more accident than motorcycle. It has no
patience for rom-coms. The environment is tailor-made to encourage sleight-of-hand. There is so
much width. So much height. Such intense brightness. The land remains so vast, harsh, and often
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so endlessly homogenous that the eye is easily baited into making far more of the situation than
is ever there to begin with. Under the glare of the midday sun, beaming down high overhead,
whatever it is the desert-goer seeks slinks itself back into the fissure from whence it came. Or, as
the young explorer Everett Reuss describes in his 1931 notebook, “My eyes are wretched. They
have been paining me severely. I couldn’t recognize my horses until I was upon them” (Ruess
298).
By the time my future wife became my former future wife, I found it impossible to use
the tube of Arm and Hammer toothpaste we had once so recently shared. The impression of her
grip was still pressed into the packaging, and I felt like as long as I left it intact, some karmic
force might keep her around, or bring her back to me. I bought a new tube, but left the former on
the counter like a vigil. Weeks went by before I could bring myself to wash the sheets. Longer
before I finally washed the pillowcases. I walked through the rest of my room like it were a
m(a)us(ol)eum, avoiding each hair tie and bobby pin with the penitent hopes of a reconciliation.
It was months before I saw her again, in the stairwell of the school we shared and which
she soon abandoned, and by then she had already become many things that had nothing to do
with me. There was a ring on her finger. And a child growing inside her. Neither of which I had
anything to do with.
When I think back on our relationship now, I remember the things that never happened
just as vividly as I do the things that did. My thoughts bleed freely between concrete memories
and scenes of an imagined, albeit aborted, future. We both fell on our road trip for the alien
charm of the blooming ocotillo plants we saw just outside of Carlsbad Caverns, their spiny,
orange-tipped green stalks shooting six feet into the air like the tail-end of a Tim Burton comet
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buried somewhere deep in the earth. And so it became the ocotillo plant which lined the
driveway to the home we so often discussed, the home we would decorate with houndstooth rugs
and gas conduit bookshelves, the home in which we’d forego televisions and internets in favor of
game nights and dinner guests, the home where we’d incorporate at least one literal
interpretation of the word bedroom—because we could, because it was ours—lining it from wall
to wall with one giant mattress, and the home we’d populate with two allergy-free, musically-
inclined, well-read, and endlessly grateful children. It is the home we came to share and love and
imagine, but never actually build.
Scientists now know that the more often we remember a certain event a particular way—
even if that event did not actually occur how we remember it, or even occur at all—the more
robust the neural pathway which encodes the event becomes. It is this process of repeated,
dubious recall that weaves distortion into objective truth, and allows for the slip between
memory and invention and projection.
Kayenta is the type of place where tumbleweed is more fact of life than quaint cliche.
Stray dogs hunt for cheeseburger wrappers in feral packs that trail the rental cars as they turn in
from the highway, one dog to each tire, their dried noses pushed flush up against the cool metal
of the car door before its even had a chance to open. Stray mules are less aggressive, but just as
abundant, and lope through the parking lot in twos and threes like old men knee-deep in tall-tale.
The Burger King, from whence the wrappers emanate, doubles as the Navajo Code Talkers
Museum. The porticos that hang over the storefronts are decorated with a semicircle painting of a
traditional Navajo dwelling, the bright turquoise and reds long since faded by the intensity of the
endless ultraviolet that the sun in this area traffics. And the stores themselves are mostly closed,
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some permanently, some bearing homemade signs affixed with Scotch tape burnt permanently
into the glass doors, declaring "Be Back Soon" or "Out To Lunch" or "Summer brake [sic].”
Though the stories we tell may never achieve a sensed reality, this does not mean that
these stories are not “real.” In fact, they may even share a physical neural locus with the concrete
memories in which we put so much stock. Of her story, Amy Hempel has said, “I could have
written a third version about everything I had modified in the ‘real’ version. Point being, you
can’t help mythologizing your own experience. It comes naturally” (“The Art of Fiction No.
176”). The stories we tell do not respect the quaint genres we place them into. They are far
sloppier. They wend across the thresholds of memory and invention and projection like a drunk,
staggering under the harshness of the midday sun. While we may see fit to apprehend our stories
—to confine them in the jail cells of genre or nostalgia or both—their escape into the wild is
inevitable.
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8) It’s called art, dickhead
DISCUSSED: factional bipolarity, September 11, 2001, Frist Campus Center, Emma E.
Booker Elementary School, Newton’ s third law, John D’Agata, the Stratosphere, Bucket
of Blood, news-as-entertainment, negation of genre, moral responsibility.
All of which is to say nothing of morality. While it should be clear by now that the artistic
freedom we gain from writing outside of rigid generic definitions results in reading experiences
that embrace a healthy, edifying ambiguity, a literature that completely dissolves (non-)fiction
poles may ultimately prove detrimental to our culture as well. From a young age, during bedtime
stories and voyages around the encyclopedia, it is literature that helps us form our relationship to
fact and fiction. While replacing “fiction” with “prose”does, on the whole, I think, create a
healthier literature, it also requires that we redefine “non-fiction,” not destroy it altogether. The
proper functioning of our society still in large part hinges on our ability to know with certainty
what set(s) of data and information to trust. Having faith in the weather forecast, for instance, is
requisite for activities that range from sartorial decisions to what flight path is viable. See also:
climate change, vaccination, elections. Our histories, news, and journalism, whose sanctity has
increasingly come under threat by the proliferation of terms and practices like “fake news,”
“deep fakes,” and conspiracy theories are themselves both victims and proponents of a factional
bipolarity. Knowing who and what to put faith in has grown, at times, nearly impossible.
To the extent that we desire society to govern itself according to objective, observable
truths, our literature plays a large part in helping us gain the skills to discern imagination from
experience, differentiate fact from lie. The argument against generic ambiguity in literature is not
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merely aesthetic. We live in a world in which our semiotics have bone and blood consequences.
Because language is the primary means by which we disseminate (literally) vital information—
like infection rates, interest percentages, and the location of an active shooter—our ability to
distinguish between language that codes true and false is often as vital as the castaway’s ability
to discern between the berry that is sweet and the one that is poison. The frustration embodied by
the writer of good conscience is that the age old heckle ignores the fact that sticks and stones
don’t break bones of their own accord—they are weaponized by humans who fall under the
influence of bellicose—and increasingly dubious—words.
Case in point: my first official day of college was on September 11, 2001. Or, rather: it
wasn’t. It is more accurate to say that my first official day of college was preempted in the early
morning of September 11, 2001 when planes began hurtling headfirst into the skyline of the
eastern seaboard. I watched in real time, frozen with horror, beside my father and stepmom on a
small 9-inch hand-me-down CRT television between the claustrophobic brick walls of my
freshman year dorm room as the stunning weaponization of commercial flight was broadcast live
to the whole world. We were silent for hours, listening rapt to Tom Brokaw’s feeble attempts at
sense-making, to eyewitness reports heavily punctuated with sirens, and to the steady hum of my
newly purchased miniature refrigerator. Barbara and my father had been on their way to Newark
International Airport to catch their return flight home to California when the nascent reports of
the first plane were broadcast over the AM dial of their rented Chevrolet Impala, at which they
immediately rerouted, parking as close to my still-slumbering dormitory as the campus police
would allow. I awoke in confusion to the aggressive rap of their knuckles on my door, their
voices urgent for me to, “Hurry up and turn the damn TV on.”
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I mention this only because English 101: Introduction to English Literature was slated to
be the very first class of my very first day of college. It was a survey course that demanded the
purchase of a thick Norton anthology populated with thousands of thin, nearly-translucent pages
which conformed to the traditional contours of the English literary canon. I had matriculated
with the expressed—if also misguided—purpose of grappling with literature, perhaps even
creating some of it myself. Instead, the story which has come to underpin all of my adult years
was being written live before my very eyes some scant 50 miles away from the dormitory which
I had only days before decorated with my parents. Many of my peers, still at that time strangers
to me, lost parents and other relatives in the aftermath, either to the carnage of the initial impact,
the dramatic implosion that followed, or to the free fall some preferred when demise became
certain. It was difficult to see where, if at all, literature fit within the tragedy that played itself out
in spontaneous sobs and uncontrollable shaking at the foot of the big screen TVs in the Frist
Campus Center television lounge.
To this day, however, I am resolute in my belief that we remain mired in a 19-year-long
war which began as a result of a misguided, knee-jerk response to the 9/11 attacks. It is a
response that was informed by the rigid, bipolar logic we also employ in our literature. Speaking
from Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Florida mere minutes after the second
plane hit the second World Trade Center tower, then-President Bush projected a calm,
determined American resolve meant at once to reassure the nation and suggest in a moment of
utter chaos a viable path forward. At 9:30 a.m., Bush took to a lectern in the school’s library and
spoke for just under two minutes to the reeling country:
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Ladies and gentlemen, this is a difficult moment for America. I, unfortunately, will be
going back to Washington after my remarks. Secretary Rod Paige and [the] Lieutenant
Governor will take the podium and discuss education. I do want to thank the folks here at
—at Booker Elementary School for their hospitality. Today, we've had a national tragedy.
Two airplanes have crashed into the World Trade Center in an apparent terrorist attack on
our country. I have spoken to the Vice President, to the Governor of New York, to the
Director of the FBI, and have ordered that the full resources of the federal government go
to help the victims and their families, and—and to conduct a full-scale investigation to
hunt down and to find those folks who committed this act. Terrorism against our nation
will not stand. And now if you [would] join me in a moment of silence. May God bless
the victims, their families, and America. Thank you very much. (Bush, George W.)
The degree to which we can be critical of Bush’s remarks must take into account the
unfathomable event they addressed. For his speech writers to have cobbled together even this
reaction in such short time would suggest that they, like Bush, were operating far more from
instinct than calculated response. And yet, I think the instinctual nature of this address
underscores the degree to which polarity is imbedded into our psyche. For while the speech
performs the much-needed action of corroborating the fact that “[t]wo planes have crashed into
the World Trade Center” before embracing the a shocked populace with soothing language that
promises “the full resources of the federal government [will] go to help the victims and their
families,” it also stubbornly refuses to linger in not-knowing even in a moment where knowing
was resolutely impossible. Before an investigation had even commenced—before the attack was
even complete—Bush declares it an “apparent terrorist act on our country” and vows to “conduct
a full-scale investigation to hunt down and to find those folks who committed this act.”
“Terrorism against our nation,” he says, “will not stand.”
Regardless of how you view Bush’s initial response to the events of 9/11, what can’t be
argued is that these words leave no room for confusion, debate, or even contemplation of an
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appropriate path forward. Instead, with the finality of Newton’s third law, horrific action
demands equal and opposite reaction, villain requires hero, and uncertainty succumbs to
decisiveness. Regardless of the details that would emerge in the weeks and months to come,
regardless of the veracity of “weapons of mass destruction,” and regardless of the terrible
calculus of death retaliation would require, this knee-jerk, instinctual response was so silently
steeped in the declaration of war that war was all but inevitable, like a swing of the pendulum
from one catastrophic pole to the other.
I am reminded of the arguments the writer John D’Agata makes to his fact-checker Jim
Fingal in Lifespan of a Fact, an epistolary book that scrutinizes the role facts play in our
contemporary literature. When D’Agata explains to Fingal in an impassioned diatribe towards
the end of their argument, “I am seeking a truth here, but not necessarily accuracy” (107), he
delineates the troubling dilemma all literary artists undertake with each stroke of the pen.
Sometimes, he suggests, being less accurate can dichotomously create writing more truthful to
experience. The book presents both the text of D’Agata’s essay “What Happens There,” which
centers on the 2002 suicide a teenager named Levi Presley committed by leaping from the
Stratosphere in Las Vegas, Nevada, alongside the heated back-and-forth debate caused by
Fingal’s extensive fact-checking.
From major qualms about the conflation of distant days to minor quibbles about the
number of strip clubs that could be found in 2002 Las Vegas, D’Agata seems determined at every
turn to thwart Fingal’s propensity for poking holes in the fabric of the text. Accused of
embellishing a quote, D’Agata admits, “I punched up his statement, but I think the basic gist is
the same” (21). Outed for substituting one bar’s name for another, D’Agata responds, “‘Bucket
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of Blood’ is more interesting than the ‘Boston Saloon,’ and since [it’s] near the Bucket of Blood,
I think the claim is OK as it stands” (16). When Fingal discovers that, according to the coroner,
there were eight and not four reported heart attacks on the day Presley committed suicide,
D’Agata responds, “I like the effect of these numbers scaling down in the sentence from five to
four to three, etc. So I’d like to leave it as is” (17). Fingal retorts, “But that would be
intentionally inaccurate” (17). But D’Agata does not share Fingal’s anxiety. For the author, the
granular details of the essay are malleable insofar as they create a grander meaning which
resonates truly with his understanding of Presley’s death (in particular) and Las Vegas (generally
speaking). “It’s called art, dickhead” (92) says D’Agata. To which, Fingal: “That’s your excuse
for everything” (92).
Fingal’s reticence is one shared by many who fear that the artful blurring of non-fiction
with creative license will produce a society incapable of knowing what to believe. Says Fingal,
When someone watches the news or reads the paper or listens to the radio in search of
“facts” about the world, is it strange that they should get upset when they’re given news-
as-entertainment, or when they’re represented with something that is altered or made up
for nefarious political or economic reasons? (110)
In the years since The Lifespan of a Fact was published, these are fears that have only
intensified. Where my panic during the Bush administration was a result of a “nefarious”
obfuscation that capitalized on the narrative of “national tragedy” to pursue an unjust war, and
where my anger during the Obama administration was triggered by the harnessing of populist
fervor to perpetuate that war’s more sinister/covert ends, we have now entered a phase of
American—nay, Western—culture that elects heads of state who lie both so openly and
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frequently that we have become numb to the consequences, even when they are counted in a
death toll in the corner of our screen. “…[I]t’s also undeniable,” says Fingal, “that there is
actually an objective past made up of real actions and real statements from real people in the
world, however clumsy or inaccurate we are at recording it or approximating it or making
meaning out of it in our mental models” (93).
D’Agata’s stance is not, as Fingal might suspect, that accuracy (as he calls it) is no longer
important. In fact, he is adamant that there are sectors of our culture that should treat accuracy—
truth, facts, etc.—as a mandate. “But I’m not a politician, Jim,” says D’Agata. “Nor am I [a]
reporter…Just because there are some parts of our culture in which we need to demand honesty
and expect reliable intentions doesn’t mean that it’s appropriate for us to expect that from every
experience we have in the world” (111). Because D’Agata is a writer—a literary “artist”—his
mandate is not fidelity to “real actions and real statements from real people in the world,” but,
rather, to truth—of experience, of emotion. “…[O]ur understanding of the world can’t be
categorized into either ‘fictional’ or ‘historical’ slots—with nothing in between,” he says. “We all
believe in emotional truths that could never hold water, but we still cling to them and insist on
their relevance” (93).
For both D’Agata and (especially) Fingal, this place “in between” is incredibly difficult
to locate. D’Agata spends much of his time declaring, like others who write “in between,” an
allegiance to the “essay” form. He is fueled by the open-ended suggestion that the term “essay”
means simply “to try,” and carries with it the freedom to change names of a bar or numbers of
heart attacks if he sees fit.
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“…[W]e’ve had the term ‘essay’ at our disposal for over five hundred years. And
appropriately enough, what the term ‘essay’ describes is not a negation of genre—as
‘nonfiction’ does—but rather an activity, ‘an attempt, a trial, an experiment.’ And so all of
a sudden under that term you can feel the genre opening back up in order to embrace its
own curiosity, trying to track the activity of a practitioner’s mind as it negotiates
memories, observations, anecdotes, history, science, myth, experience…” (111)
But that term seems, I think, too clouded with notions of schoolwork and diatribe and
“five hundred years” of “trying to find meaning” (111) to illicit the reading experience D’Agata
is after. Even at its widest berth, “essay” still manages to create an expectation for writing that is
narrower than some (mislabeled) writing wishes to be. And, as the entire debate between
D’Agata and Fingal illustrates, “essay” is still a problematic term that suggests different tenets to
different readers. As D’Agata points out,
What we’re dancing around here is the idea of moral responsibility in nonfiction. […]
And this is frustrating, because we would never be having this conversation about a work
of poetry or fiction or drama. Those are literary genres that we recognize without any
question, as literary. As artful. But nonfiction has been struggling to distinguish itself as
art for decades in our culture.” (111)
The solution, I think, is for a large portion of our literature to adopt a generic term that is
even more formally open-ended than “essay” and which brings with it no mandates on content.
“Prose” defines itself only in relation to the aesthetics of verse. “Unlike verse, which is
composed in lines and stanzas, I will be written in paragraph form,” says prose, and leaves the
rest up to the writer. More importantly, perhaps, it leaves the rest up to the reader.
I dream of a genre that spans so many possibilities that my reading is not preordained by
expectation. I dream of reading books that conflate and confuse and coerce and collapse in on
themselves, of writing books that react violently against precedent and prediction and
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premeditation. Like Fingal, I worry that such a genre would add gas to the fire in the fact-telling
department of our culture, a fire raging so out of control that it threatens to burn the whole
experiment of society down to the grown. But “prose” would also, at least, allow us to practice
the confusion which we are forced to swallow during every press briefing, every edition of the
evening news, every Tweet storm. “Prose” would give us the leeway to create en masse the sort
of literature that would better respond to the fluidity of our modern culture. I yearn for us to
embrace the confusion of not-knowing in our art so that we may better navigate the confusing
facts of life as, inevitably, they arise. Ultimately, I agree rather vehemently with D’Agata that
…we’re adolescent when it comes to art. We’ve almost entirely disenfranchised art in our
public schools, in our homes, in our culture at large. Of course we’re going to stomp our
feet and scream when we’re suddenly thrown a curveball after emotionally opening
ourselves up to something and then learning that that thing isn’t exactly what it seems.
And of course that’s going to feel like a betrayal, because we don’t have enough deep
experiences with art to know that that is what art is for: to break us open, to make us raw,
to destabilize our understanding of ourselves and of our world so that we can experience
both anew, with fresh eyes, and with therefore the possibility of recognizing something
that we had not recognized before. Art is supposed to change us, to challenge us, and yes,
even to trick us.” (110)
It speaks volumes that About a Mountain, the book-length manuscript into which
D’Agata adapted his Las Vegas essay, was housed neither within “non-fiction” nor “essay”
genres. Given the stubborn, dogged arguments made in The Lifespan of a Fact, one can only
imagine the lengthy debates with publishers regarding genre that went on behind the scenes.
Instead of forging a new path, the book abides the noncommittal “cultural studies” label and
includes a lengthy section of notes that (reluctantly) pull back the curtain for the reader. “I have
conflated time,” admits D’Agata. “I have also changed subjects’ names,” he admits, “or
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combined a number of subjects into a single composite ‘character’” (203). Reading these notes,
you can sense D’Agata’s exhaustion. At times, they read like a how-to or a backtrack on a book
that would have been more impactful, I think, without them. His are the weary admissions of an
author who, like me, knows that until the rigid, bipolar grip of literary genres loosens, our
literature will remain complicit in encouraging the crippling polarity that pervades a society
frothing to cleave itself in two. !98
Concrete Flag
During those two sweltering summer hours that I searched desperately and in vain for
ATHAS STOMPER, I grew increasingly convinced that I had become my Grandma Jack.
I know how this sounds.
And yet.
When I tell it now, I say, “You’d have to not see it to believe it.” I say, “It was a sleight of
land.” I say, over lunch, or while biting into a pristine ice cream cone, “It was a case of out of
sight, out of my mind.” These are my feeble attempts. Our language is a moat. Quaint. Romantic.
Etc.

It is a looming fear particular to those of us closely related to the insane that we will one
day succumb to insanity ourselves. That our own manifestation of acute mania is an inevitable
matter of time. That such close proximity—genetic, physical, emotional—predestines diagnosis.
As if mental illness were an airborne pathogen. As if it were communicable by sneeze. As if our
front row seat to madness will ensure we get called up from the ranks of understudy, the schism
growing like a spotlight expanding out from the lead to contaminate the supporting cast as well.
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Though science plods on, there is still so much we don’t know about the brain’s propensity to left
turn that we tend to rely on anecdotal evidence alone. Out of an abundance of precaution, we
vigilantly review the trajectory of descent and scrutinize even the faintest suggestion that we
might be on the same path. In photographs, we lament shared mannerisms (the crookedness of a
grin, the emptiness of a stare) as if they were incriminating evidence. We worry about those traits
beyond our control that confirm other vulnerabilities to the twisted roots of our family tree—an
allergy to pollen; degenerative eye disease; lengthy, pyrotechnic bouts of depression. We alarm
when long-lost family friends call the house phone out of the blue during a holiday and confuse
our salutation for the sick’s. And we take disproportionate refuge in examples of our
individuality. Proof of our distinction. Autonomy. Cling to even the smallest hint that we are
fundamentally different and will therefore be spared the same, dismal fate. If she was scrambled
eggs, we lean hard boiled. If she was a buff for history, we profess English. We screen our
genealogy for questionable alleles and telltale markers. Participate in all the trials and spit in all
the vials and send them to all the research labs, just in case. Offer ourselves up for cutting-edge,
double blind studies. Read twice each intake question just to be sure. Double check with
dismissive doctors. Remain dubious when we are time and again reassured that while our
beloved grandmother may very well have gone off the proverbial deep end in front of our very
own two eyes, we, in fact, stand firmly on so-called solid ground.
And yet. And still. The haunt remains. The threat looms. Persists. Like a dark cloud on
the horizon. Like a jury deep in deliberation. Like a conclusion that is stuck between forgone and
fact.
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I had returned to New York City on an extended two-day layover with the expressed
purpose of strolling aimlessly and with muted fanfare down memory lanes suspended in various
states of neglect. It had been years since I last called the city home, and a fortuitous last-minute
opening in my calendar meant that I could take a few extra days to wander peacefully under the
radar without the sort of concrete plans that usually ruined trips to New York with a burdensome
cascade of price-inflated lunches and dinner reservations shared with that variety of friend I felt
guilty not seeing but had definitely abandoned for a reason in the first place. These were
stubborn people that had stayed in New York for the same reasons I had left. People that could
not bear the thought of being anywhere but the center of attention no matter how far they were
flung from the eye of the storm into some basement-level attempt at head-barely-above-water.
While some New York homecomings play out like that confetti-strewn ticker tape parade with
the kiss-happy sailor dipping the swooned woman in white at the waist, the few times I had
previously returned convened more like a weeklong swap meet of questionable career pivots,
humble brags, pettifogs, banalities, pooled credit cards, and curable diseases transmitted
primarily through sex. We talked about last straws and rent hikes. Stop and frisk and I can’t
breathe. The perennial close of the L-train. Rat infestation. The encroachment of political
correctness. Where they had begun to dig the next mass grave. New York was always more or
less a clockwork island of undercard obligations that never quite felt like it got itself around to
the main event. I just missed the new exhibit at the new museum I had been meaning to see. Or
couldn’t make time for another crack at running a personal best around the reservoir in Central
Park. There was always just barely enough time after a has-it-really-been-that-long concluded
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Uptown to make it to a for-old-times’-sake in Bed-Stuy or Red Hook. Which is why I opted for
rogue and told nobody I was coming, and why I planned instead a sort of romantic(ized)
rendezvous with the city itself. A day or two to remember the contour of its whimsy. Some
much-needed alone time to get reacquainted with each other without the interjection of my
confederates or their hangers-on. The freedom to return once more to the ranks of tourist in a city
that had so thoroughly ground me down and spat me out felt like I was a rabid animal being
handed the keys to the zoo. I became improvisational. Instinctual. Carte blanche. Unfettered.
As fate would have it, the one true New York City friend I would have liked to see
(Chris) was back in California, visiting parents that had begun the steady slide into geriatrics.
Which (sadly) meant that we wouldn’t get a chance to reprise our ongoing one-on-one half-court
basketball feud, on which we bet things far outside our sphere of influence, like the Post-
Capitalistic Fate of the Western World or (if tempers flared) the Early Death of our Feeble
Mothers (to 21, by 1s, street rules, etc.). But his absence also meant that I had a studio apartment
all to myself waiting for me in the newly gilded guts of a rapidly gentrifying post-millennial
Brooklyn that I no longer recognized. I traced the nighttime skyline from the small oval window
of the plane with the sort of hard-won pride that accompanies eyes familiar enough with New
York to have memorized its relationship to the cardinal points. For some the city is best
symbolized by the Empire State Building, and in recent years the fact that it lights up at night in
color schemes that pay homage to passing holidays and current events wins it mass appeal. It
could beam like a banner spangled in stars. Pulse emerald to avoid the St. Patty’s pinch. And
during this long spate of death, it shoots up in pitch black, a monolith of mourning. At 1,250 feet
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tall, it laid claim to the title of World’s Tallest Building for over forty years from 1931 to 1972.
An unparalleled achievement. But I have always felt like New York’s heart sat precariously atop
the mid-city spire of the Chrysler Building, those arrowed Art Deco arches near the zenith urging
the eye higher and higher. While it doesn’t bandy about its accolades as flamboyantly as that
building that overtook its position at the top of the skyscraper food chain, the Chrysler Building
persists as a sort of Old Faithful whose exterior was originally constructed mostly with outmoded
brick even while its design leaned into the verticality of our future. Once I had located it, from
plane, train, or automobile, the jigsaw of the city always fell into place.
From our final approach, the brake lights of crosstown traffic at 42
nd
and 34
th
and 14
th
all
merged into a smear of red that seemed like open wounds, as if Manhattan had been lashed
violently from East River to Hudson. In the wider, vertical canyons of the avenues, headlights
began to turn on—quiet evidence of humans churning cog-like below. The city from that pitch
and altitude was a lesson in basic geometry. The rectangular high-rise windows yellowed by the
glow of incandescent lightbulbs. The water tower cylinders perched precariously on rooftops.
The extended grid of streets and avenues divvying up the terrain like a sheet of city-sized graph
paper. It was hard after so many flights in and out of New York to remember back to a time when
this landing was virgin territory. I suppose there were even others on my flight experiencing it all
for the first time, like I had as a child when we came to help my grandfather convalesce after his
lobectomy. Of that trip I remember a Spanish dinner somewhere in Jersey City, and the tubes that
filled every orifice of my grandfather’s face, his eyes blinking Morse in lieu of speech. In the
airplane, I told my father that the city looked like a dartboard. This was back when I was still
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ignorant to the subtle difference between flightpaths servicing JFK and LaGuardia and Newark
International. Back when New York was still suffused with the hand-me-down lore my father
told me about growing up in its shadow, when it was petty crime and cars as large as boats that
wouldn’t start in the dead of winter, and a few select scenes from movies that featured F.A.O.
Schwartz. like BIG and Home Alone 2.
Antonio Sant’Elia believed that the city of the future should “be the immediate and
faithful projection of ourselves.” Much to our chagrin, if New York is any indicator, we may
(sadly) have achieved his goal. Though the visionary Italian architect left behind almost no fully-
realized construction, he was instrumental in articulating the Futurist approach to architecture.
Instrumental in articulating, to a large extent, the future (period). In The Manifesto of Futurist
Architecture, first published over one hundred years ago in August of 1914, Sant’Elia rejected
the practice of using of new and technologically superior materials simply to perpetuate
“classical models instead of throwing…minds open in search of new frontiers.” He loathed the
inefficiency of an aesthetic that clung to cupolas and filigree, and argued for structural changes
in both content and form. “Modern constructional materials and scientific concepts,” he argued,
“are absolutely incompatible with the disciplines of historical styles, and are the principal cause
of the grotesque appearance of ‘fashionable’ buildings in which attempts are made to employ the
lightness, the superb grace of the steel beam, the delicacy of reinforced concrete, in order to
obtain the heavy curve of the arch and the bulkiness of marble.” Sant’Elia’s uncompromising
vision demanded a “break from tradition” that capitalized on “scientific and technical expertise”
to end “monumental, funereal and commemorative architecture” and sought, quite literally, to
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“raise the level of the city.” As in: verticalize it. The drawings that comprise his Cittá Nuova
depict massive structures that erupt high into the sky. They elide nearly all ornamentation. They
are robust, monolithic exemplars of formal functionality and precise calculation and staggering
simplicity and “large scale dispositions.” Looking at them is like looking at a blueprint for the
urban cities we occupy now, only injected with industrial-grade steroids, fortified with
testosteronic hubris. They dwarf their proposed inhabitants (us) like ants. They are staunchly
divorced from nature, transparently cynical of the quaint and/or decorative and/or superfluous,
and yet still at times manage to suggest a sort of organic, symbiotic interconnectivity, as if the
structures themselves were alive and breathing and communicating in a language sequestered to
ducts and vents and shafts and conduits. In its endless pathways and boulevards and catwalks, in
its subterranean corridors and thoroughfares, in its abrupt transition from flat, horizontal city
planning to an eruption of Babels climbing to the heavens, in its sheer magnitude—Sant’Elia
authored the City of the Future which, in many ways, we are still to this day trying valiantly
(stubbornly?) to execute.
But for all the futuristic allure of Sant’Elia’s strident vision, it also failed miserably to
account for those perpetual disappointments that characterize what is lovingly referred to as The
Human Condition. I suppose in aiming (literally) for the stars, it can be easy to forget to keep
your feet planted firmly on solid ground. I mean verbs like respiration, micturition, defecation.
Nouns like atrocity, napalm, drone, cholesterol. How does the City of the Future deal, for
instance, with stray dogs and cats? Parallel parking? Publc intoxication? His drawings are
visually stunning in their forceful break from extant architectural traditions, and now hang
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ironically in the permanent collection of the Pinacoteca museum in picturesque, neoclassical
Como, Italy. This is a place where well-clad men and women and children pilot summer boats in
loafers past verandas and piazzas as quartets play Wagner’s “Wedding March” to destination
brides and grooms inevitably bound for bitter divorce. But, like the elegant city that now hosts
them, the drawings that comprise Cittá Nuova lack graffiti. They are devoid of glitching digital
advertisements and jammed traffic and systematic racism. They do not account for sewage leaks,
or neonatal intensive care units, or seasonal upticks in the rate of violent suicide, or global
pandemic. Nowhere are bunions considered, nor poor credit scores, food poisoning, general
nausea, exhaustion, lymph nodes, CCTV .
I opted to forgo the hail of cab and took, as was my habit, the subway into the heart of the
heart of the city instead. Although, from that far out near JFK, “subway” was a misnomer I
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Figure 11
enjoyed taking advantage of. Though so much of the subway’s mythology derives from its
wormlike tunneling through the undercarriage of the city proper, and from the way it transports
you almost like teleportation, almost as if by magic from one locale to the next, I most enjoyed
those raised sections of the subway fully exposed to the elements that weren’t sub- at all. Near
Coney Island. High above in Yonkers. Especially before the darkness of night turned the
windows into mirrors, the view from a subway exposed to broad daylight felt like the slow pan
of a tracking shot filmed in deluxe Panavision. It was a procession of performance art, as if the
city was comprised exclusively of an army of extras who had perfected the intricate
choreography of bodega leans and stoop smoking and jaywalking and pushcart beer delivery just
for my amusement, just so to keep the charade intact. Every metropolis celebrates its own
distinct set of verbs and nouns and adjectives that organize an idiosyncratic movement of bodies,
the flow of traffic, the topography of edifices, the sounds and the smells and the tastes. Barcelona
touts its Eixample. New Orleans levies wards and beignets and a bead-driven economy of flesh.
Some cities are coca leaves. Some a loaf of sourdough. They are orca whales and okra dishes and
the sting of winter wind as it whips off Lake Michigan. Each city is an apocryphal accumulation
of phenomenal stimuli that combine like a fingerprint. Like a sequence of chromosomic slangs
and gaits and hand gestures that each have their unique way of telling you to go fuck yourself. It
is sound design and prop departments and Central Casting. A mohawk, a fixed-gear bicycle, a
dog the size of your lap. And while a cab may have been the shortest distance between two New
York City points, I always preferred snippets of eaves-dropped conversation to a well-throttled
expressway. “Tell your mother to kick his ass to the curb.” “I’m telling you, God isn’t listening.”
“I hear they don’t even bother placing sheets over the bodies anymore.” I prefer, as I did on that
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evening’s train into the city, the chance to see the young woman play old melodies on her erhu
for the spare change in strangers’ pockets. Unless that evening happened in fact to be the brief
glimpse of water balloons being tossed by knuckleheads from the fire escape near the Van Siclen
stop. Or, or, or. The city in passing is always a smear. A take-your-pick of in situ dioramas. A
context. A circumstance. A dilemma.
What Sant’Elia did not—could not—know was that summer in his City of the Future is
the pervasive aroma of fermenting garbage. It is swamp ass and fire hydrant oases. It is a gutter
glutted with lottery scratchers and used prophylactics. It is the empty Trojan Horse subway car
vacant only because the air conditioning has malfunctioned. And/or/also because its lone patron
is splayed out across three seats in a shallow pool of his own excrement. It is midair hot dog
vomit on the Brooklyn Flyer. Or the fumble of exploratory digits engaged in backseat heavy
petting during a midnight taxicab fender-bender on the BQE. It is three Duane Reades just to get
one dose of Plan B. It is a fifth of cheap vodka on the Fourth of July under a sky of Roman
Candles. And it’s a swarm of nude cyclists at dusk. Fourteen (additional) dead bees billowing on
the window sill. A chronic case of bed bugs. An aggressive busk gone awry. And the type of
middle-aged men who spend all day in tube socks researching things like tugboats or lens
mechanics in the stately Rare Book Division of beautiful buildings like the Schwarzman branch
of the New York Public Library.
According to the fifth and most recent edition of the notorious Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual of Mental Disorders, the confirmed schizophrenic will exhibit two or more of the
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following behaviors for a period that exceeds one month where at least one of these must be (1),
(2), or (3):
1. Delusions.
2. Hallucinations.
3. Disorganized speech (e.g., frequent derailment or incoherence).
4. Grossly disorganized or catatonic behavior.
5. Negative symptoms (i.e., diminished emotional expression or avolition).
It can be a great comfort to distill something as confusing, unwieldy, and destructive as
schizophrenia into five neat categories. To impose order on a disorder. It is the sort of condition
that nearly everyone can recognize but very few can actually define, like that trope of describing
colors to the blind or the taste of water to fish. This is because while the general impairments
common to schizophrenia are universal, they manifest in ways as varied and idiosyncratic as the
human minds that harbor them. No two iterations of insanity are alike. Each instance is a
byproduct of the totality of the life it co-opts. Every errant thought. Every unique experience.
Feeding ducks at Polliwog Park as a child. A frustrating preponderance of tonsilloliths and
halitosis. Premature pornography. That first pubescent strum of heavily distorted electric guitar.
Etc. What age were you when you first heard The Supremes? Milo Goes to College? How did
you discover your love of the green olive? Were you, like me, taken by your recently-divorced
father to see slasher movies at least a decade before they were age-appropriate? The ingredients
of our malady are as rich and infinite as our existence itself. Schizophrenia is both of and from
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and against the complex mind of its host. The DSM (as it is colloquially referred to) explains this
by stating that the “diagnosis involves the recognition of a constellation of signs and symptoms
associated with impaired occupational or social functioning. Individuals with the disorder will
vary substantially on most features, as schizophrenia is a heterogeneous clinical syndrome.”
It can be almost beautiful—poetic—to think of schizophrenia as a universe of
overlapping constellations. As if it were some decipherable system of interconnected explosions
of the once-spotless mind that conspire to dictate your fate. When, in reality, it is often a
nebulous and impenetrably thick, swerve-worthy brain fog. It reaches stealthily into even the
quiet corners of your life and accrues and festers and mangles with the haphazard calamity of
knotted hair in the aging drain. The façade of a strong, principled, peer-reviewed diagnostic test
makes it tempting to imagine the clinician observing each break with reality from behind the
panes of a double mirror with clipboard in hand, confidently checking off one box after another
as behaviors present that neatly conform to the preordained DSM rubric. But, as its appellation
suggests, the DSM purposefully traffics in the dispassionate language of the instruction manual
genre, providing doctors and physicians a clear, succinct, and standardized resource to assess
potential patients. Although there is considerable criticism regarding methodology, statistics, and
criterion both within the American Psychiatric Association—the governing body responsible for
the DSM—and from a chorus of sovereign detractors, the mere existence of a common, workable
definition is at the very least a useful tool by which many disparate interests can orient even
while they disagree. At the same time, the discord underscores the failure of any rigid diagnostic
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to account comprehensively and/or appropriately for the wild spectrum of behaviors all housed
under the rubric of one five-syllable word that carries with it the stigma of a death sentence.
The months that precipitated my escape from New York were, even by city standards,
particularly violent. Egregious. Not so much in the quantity of crime, but its quality. I remember
gore being squeezed from every last pore of the city until, finally, I was forced to declare defeat.
In July, for instance, a man named Tareyton Williams attacked and nearly killed an innocent
bystander—a postman—who was waiting on the platform of the 110
th
Street subway station. The
newspaper article I read at the time reported:
It was not quite a massacre, but a mad rampage by a man wielding two cordless
chainsaws on a New York subway station last week has city dwellers once again asking
how safe they are.
The attack, which began soon after 3am on a platform just south of Columbia
University, left one man seriously injured with deep cuts to his stomach and chest as well
as a broken rib and a punctured lung. The victim, Michael Steinberg, 64, was recovering
in hospital.
“The motor kept going on and he was trying to cut through me,” Mr. Steinberg said.
He added that subway workers watched from the sidelines and did nothing at first to help
him.
It is only three weeks since the city was shocked by another incident when a man
from Boston was accused of going on a 13-hour stabbing spree through the streets and
underground stations of Manhattan, allegedly knifing four people, three of them tourists.
Police officials said the man with the chainsaws left the subway after the attack,
dumped the tools in a waste bin and, two hours later, set upon a young New Yorker
walking his dog, punching him repeatedly. The suspect was arrested shortly afterwards
and identified as Tareyton Williams, a former convict, who lives in the Bronx.
Mr. Williams, witnesses said, had stepped onto the platform carrying a large stuffed
toy gorilla. After urinating in a bottle, he apparently traded the gorilla for two black and
yellow power saws that had been left unattended by contractors working on the public
address system.
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Delusions, according to the DSM, come in five distinct varieties: persecutory, referential,
somatic, religious, and grandiose. In list form, they sound something like insidious Care Bears or
rejected Seven Dwarves. And, as you might expect, the ground they cover is vast and diverse.
Persecutory delusions (i.e., belief that one is going to be harmed, harassed, and so
forth by an individual, organization, or other group) are most common. Referential
delusions (i.e., belief that certain gestures, comments, environmental cues, and so forth
are directed at oneself) are also common. Grandiose delusions (i.e., when an individual
believes that he or she has exceptional abilities, wealth, or fame) and erotomanic
delusions (i.e., when an individual believes falsely that another person is in love with him
or her) are also seen. Nihilistic delusions involve the conviction that a major catastrophe
will occur, and somatic delusions focus on preoccupations regarding health and organ
function.
The DSM cites many specific examples of delusions that populate the literature: the belief
that an outside force has removed his or her internal organs and replaced them with someone
else’s organs without leaving any wounds or scars; the unshakable belief that one is under
surveillance by the police, despite a lack of convincing evidence; the belief that one’s thoughts
have been “removed” by some outside force (thought withdrawal); that alien thoughts have been
put into one’s mind (thought insertion); or that one’s body or actions are being acted on or
manipulated by some outside force (delusions of control). Even with this extensive schematic, it
can sometimes be difficult to differentiate between innocuous conspiracy theory and
proportionate paranoia and psychotic delusion. Some of the most common modern delusions
involve the unshakable belief that governments and other state apparatuses are “listening” and/or
“watching” to our every word and action via smart phones and/or the increasingly omnipresent
intrusion of our technologies. Haven’t we all, at some point, had the sneaking suspicion that our
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devices are monitoring us even when we aren’t looking? Reporting our whereabouts. Compiling
data on our spending habits. Targeting us with the corresponding advertisements. Etc. Where,
exactly, is the line between healthy distrust and pathological disorder? According to the DSM,
“[t]he distinction between a delusion and a strongly held idea is sometimes difficult to make and
depends in part on the degree of conviction with which the belief is held despite clear or
reasonable contradictory evidence regarding its veracity.” But what to do in a world where
contradictory evidence is increasingly both less clear and reasonable? Where sanity and insanity
begin to require the same leap of faith?
I can no longer say with a high degree of certainty whether I was fifteen- or sixteen-
years-old when, upon returning home from a midweek school day draped in that distinctive
quality of greedy, golden, late-afternoon sun, which always seems more dramatic and intense
cast in that nostalgic Southern California glow of my youth, and always stumbles slowly into
pornographic(ally purple) sunsets that perch on the horizon like a petulant, sleep-averse child
stalling before bed, I leapt from the car, in what I remember was a particularly jocular after
school mood, either because (if I was fifteen-years-old) I arrived in the forest green, inside-joke-
laden Oldsmobile owned and operated by my neighbor, Aaron Klafter, a human “hang loose”
who was two years my senior and graciously offered to drive me to and from school, giving me
the rare and valuable clout of being friends with a senior, or otherwise because (if I was sixteen-
years-old) I had only just procured my driver’s license and was, undoubtedly, gleeful just to be
allowed that sort of vehicular autonomy in the first place, and in any case the music would have
been loud and fast coming from the speakers of either car, alerting the suburban beach town
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streets through which it reverberated of the muted rage dappling our teenage hormones, such that
when I arrived there at the bottom of 26
th
Street under the shadow of that one impossibly tall
palm tree that they have since cut down on the corner of Blanche and either swung myself out of
Aaron’s Oldsmobile (if I was fifteen) or otherwise leapt from my own used two-tone Ford
Explorer (if I was sixteen) and found my Grandma Jack akimbo in the driveway, hysterical,
naked from the waist up, her fleshy, oblong breasts swaying like deflated, gnawed udders with
each Frankenstein-ish step she took towards me, her arms gesticulating wildly, and when I heard
her begin to scream on endless repeat, as if possessed, as if on fire, as if there was something I
should be doing about it, calling out both to me and to no one in particular and also to anyone
that just so happened to be passing by, “The man! The man!”, screaming this over and over in a
voice that I had never heard before, the only logic-adjacent explanation I could muster amidst the
commotion was that she had been raped and left for dead on the side of what had, up to that
point, been a street—more of an alley, really, lined on one side with lavish, two-story Tree
Section homes and, on the other, a Southern California Edison electricity substation—whose
only violence was the occasional besmirching of the asphalt when a dog saw fit to shit and piss, a
street/alley where I learned the shin-busting art of the kickflip, and where I gunned my mother’s
Camry into the fence when she taught me how to park or, rather, didn’t, and where years later I
would kiss a woman in the sort of way that (finally) meant I meant it, all of which made my
Grandma Jack’s distress seem preposterous, seem incongruous, seem out of place there on that
idyllic Southern Californian street/alley, so that in response to the calamity of her nude torso and
incessant yelling, my immediate, knee-jerk reaction was to throw myself around her like a wet
blanket, like a life preserver, my arms sliding snugly around hers to keep them from flailing, the
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loose skin of her exposed back enveloping the soft underside of my forearms as I pulled them
down tightly around her, behind her, cinching her, sweat—both hers and mine—suctioning us
together, bonding us, and her voice still desperate and maybe (it seemed) laced with beer(?) and
now in my ear, so: louder, gravelled, still saying “The man! The man!” like she was bleating, like
she was her own siren, and even then as I scanned our pacific, sun-drenched, late-afternoon,
palm-treed surroundings for a glimpse of this man that had done this to her, this man that had
raped her, and even as I tried to grapple with the reality of my grandmother being raped in the
first place, in broad daylight, in or near the house that I had been raised in, raped in or near the
house that she had raised me in, in or near the house behind which my mother had built a studio
apartment over the garage for my Grandma Jack, even though she (my Grandma Jack) was not
her (my mother’s) mother, even though she (my Grandma Jack) was her (my mother’s) mother-
in-law, or, rather, by that time she (my Grandma Jack) was her (my mother’s) ex-mother-in-law,
how even after the divorce my mother built my Grandma Jack (her ex-mother-in-law) a studio
apartment over the garage so that she (my Grandma Jack) had a place to live, so that after school
I would have a place to go, a place where I could learn how to be a man from the woman that
had raised my father, a place where she could maybe get right the things she had gotten wrong
with him (my father), a place where I was held accountable and required to complete all of my
homework before I was granted access to an ice-cold Coca-Cola and/or a KitKat bar and/or Pop
Secret popcorn and/or her junior-sized classical guitar and/or the remote control, a place where I
was allowed to change the channel from coverage of the O.J. Simpson trial if and only if and
when my times tables were flawless all the way from one to twelve, if and only if I could reply
correctly and without hesitation to a multiplication problem conjured by my Grandma Jack at
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random, and where she (my Grandma Jack) told me stories about my father, about how he got his
nickname (Thumper) from the massive size of his baby thighs, how as a child herself she had
never been afraid to “give hell” to the little white boys that bullied her or her sisters (Lois and
Elaine) when they jumped rope or played jacks on their street in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, where
she (my Grandma Jack) was raised by her Aunt Lilly, because her own mother, whose name I
didn’t know, was either an alcoholic or an addict or somesuch similar, although maybe I am
getting this wrong, maybe I am conflating different stories that my Grandma Jack told me about
growing up in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, which is where she lived unless it was that era of her life
spent in Camden, or (after she met and married and had three children with my grandfather) East
Orange, but in any case I felt my grandmother shake in my arms with the fright of a well-beaten
puppy, shake as if she was a human San Andreas, shake in the way that seemed like hypothermia
even there in the heat of the bright sun, and I thought of all of this as I darted my fifteen- or
perhaps sixteen-year-old eyes over her shoulders and then back behind my own to make visual
confirmation of this man—this man that had raped my Grandma Jack, which I surmised from her
nudity and from her yelling over and over in my ear, “The man! The man!”—and I tried very
hard to imagine what this man might look like, how old this man might be, what this man might
be wearing, what the state of his facial hair might be, how it might be completely clean-shaven,
as with a straight razor and gently warmed shaving cream, or otherwise it might be some telltale
goatee or trimmed mustache that this man sported, this man that had pushed my grandmother to
the ground, to the carpet, onto her bed, perhaps, if he had posed as a UPS delivery man, if he had
knocked on the door of the apartment my mother had built for her (my Grandma Jack) over the
garage so that she would have a place to live, so that I would have a place to go after school,
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especially in those days before I was fifteen- and/or sixteen-years old, when my autonomy was in
larval form, when I still required the watchful eye of a grandmother in the evening while my
mother was still at work, and if she (my Grandma Jack) had come to the door, cracking it,
saying, as she always did, even when she knew it was me that was knocking, saying “Who is it?”
while peering out through the slit in the door at the man—“The man! The man!”—in his UPS
uniform, surprised (maybe) that it wasn’t me, since it was an after school hour of the day,
surprised but in any case cracking the door wider to see what type of parcel he might be
delivering, even though she couldn’t for the life of her remember having ordered anything,
scowling at him in that distrustful manner she had with everyone, even the people she loved, as if
the world was out to get her, as if the world had another thing coming, and this man dressed in
his UPS uniform smiling at her, parcel-less, empty-handed, a tooth snaggled, the smell of Oberto
beef jerky still on his breath, saying to her, “Hello, ma’am!”, before barging his way through the
door, lunging out for her mouth with salty palms to silence her before she had time to yell, to
scream—“The man! The man!”—forcing her onto the couch where I ate Klondike bars with her,
or onto the bed where she taught me how to finger the difficult G7dim chord on her junior-sized
classical guitar, ripping at her clothes and gagging her with a hand towel snatched from the
galley kitchen, moving over and through her flesh with his calloused hands, with his tongue,
taking from it what little nearly seven decades had left behind, squeezing and kneading and
spitting on/into a body that had constructed—miraculously—three humans inside of it,
constructed two (Uncle Jerry and Uncle Jeffrey) even at the same time—twins—a body that had
rebuked the habitual backhand of a violent mid-century husband with the subtle bloom of
colorful bruises, a body that guarded lives at the Ginny Duenkel Pool in West Orange, New
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Jersey, a body that had guided young minds through the catastrophe of Social Studies and
American History at East Orange High School, a body that bathed me, a body that wore
muumuus to the beach, a body that was defenseless, soft as a potato, beaten down by gravity,
succumbing to lupus, to cigarettes, a body now splayed by this man, this man incapable of
managing the malfunction in his head and heart that nudged him to take what little there was left
of my Grandma Jack in the comfort of her own home, or thereabouts, before running away,
climbing into his UPS truck, What can brown do for you?, in the nick of time, before I was able
to rescue her, before I was able to prevent whatever final erosion he foisted upon her, and as I
held her, shhhing her, tell her, “You’re alright…Grandma, you’re alright…”, trying desperately
and in vain to believe myself so that she might believe me, too, saying, cooing, “You’re alright…
Grandma, you’re alright…”, I began to run through the terrible, violent things my fifteen- or
sixteen-year-old fists would and/or could do to him, legal and otherwise—the man that had just
raped my Grandma Jack—when (finally) they (my fists) found themselves close enough to force
their knuckles through the softer cavities of his now-endangered skull.
Wrote Antonio Sant’Elia: “We must invent and rebuild the Futurist city like an immense
and tumultuous shipyard, agile, mobile and dynamic in every detail; and the Futurist house must
be like a gigantic machine. The lifts must no longer be hidden away like tapeworms in the niches
of stairwells; the stairwells themselves, rendered useless, must be abolished, and the lifts must
scale the lengths of the façades like serpents of steel and glass. The house of concrete, glass and
steel, stripped of paintings and sculpture, rich only in the innate beauty of its lines and relief,
extraordinarily ‘ugly’ in its mechanical simplicity, higher and wider according to need rather than
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the specifications of municipal laws. It must soar up on the brink of a tumultuous abyss: the
street will no longer lie like a doormat at ground level, but will plunge many stories down into
the earth, embracing the metropolitan traffic, and will be linked up for necessary
interconnections by metal gangways and swift-moving pavements.”
This was in 1914. Sixteen years before the Chrysler Building. Seventeen years before the
Empire State Building. At the time, the tallest manmade structure in the world was New York’s
792-foot Woolworth Building. But in Italy, Sant’Elia would have been hard pressed to
experience a building any taller than 150 feet. Only the overly ornate Mole Antonelliana in
Turin, completed in 1889 as a Jewish synagogue which topped out at 550 feet, would have had
any possible influence on Sant’Elia’s vision of a vertical City of the Future. Curiously, the word
“mole” in Italian is used to suggest a building of monumental proportions. Not, as in English, a
blind rodent digging deep and stubbornly into the earth.
And then, months later, another (different) Williams (Robert A.) spent nineteen hours—
nineteen—brutally beating, torturing, and raping a 23-year-old Columbia University journalism
student in a building a few short blocks from my Shelburne-Hall apartment. According to that
report,
A 30-year-old ex-convict was charged yesterday in the rape and torture of a Columbia
University journalism school graduate student last week.
The man, Robert A. Williams, who once served eight years for attempted murder, was
arrested on Thursday night at the scene of an unrelated burglary in Hollis, Queens, Police
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Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said. He had been identified by the police as the
suspect earlier in the day, and a police photograph of him circulated widely.
Mr. Williams is charged with kidnapping, arson, attempted murder, rape, robbery and
sex abuse in the attack on the 23-year-old student in Hamilton Heights in Manhattan, the
police said.
The woman was returning to her apartment on Hamilton Terrace near West 141
st

Street on April 13 at 9:30 p.m. when a man who had gotten into the lobby entered the
elevator with her and forced his way into her apartment, Mr. Kelly said.
Over the next 19 hours, Mr. Kelly said, the man tied the woman to her bed with
computer cables and taped her mouth closed, raped and sodomized her repeatedly, burned
her with hot water and bleach, slit her eyelids with scissors, and force-fed her an
overdose of ibuprofen or a similar pain reliever.
At one point last Saturday afternoon, Mr. Kelly said, the assailant took the woman’s
A.T.M. card, withdrew $200 at a bodega on West 141
st
Street and returned to her
apartment. A few hours later, he set fire to the woman’s futon and left her, unconscious, to
die, Mr. Kelly said. She woke up to the smell of smoke, used the flames to melt the cable
that bound her to the bed frame, and escaped, Mr. Kelly said.
The student remained hospitalized in stable condition yesterday with chemical burns
on her face and torso, heat burns on her hands, liver damage from the pain pills, and cuts,
Mr. Kelly said. Neither her name nor that of the hospital has been released.
Another competing theory is that schizophrenia is not an insanity inherent to The Human
Condition, but (rather) a logical if also involuntary human reaction to the insanity of modern life.
The argument suggests that schizophrenia is not a condition of the sick individual but, rather, a
sickness of the society that has been conditioned to reject him. In a world gone mad, it is
ultimately the sane who are suspicious. Disciples of this viewpoint often point to the dearth of
ancient and historic narratives that reference and/or describe schizophrenic-like conditions.
While in Egyptian hieroglyphs and ancient Greek, Arabic, and Roman texts there are iterations of
psychoses, melancholias, and generalized manias, there exists no compelling textual evidence to
support behavior that falls under the rubric of what, today, we call schizophrenia. The rise of
schizophrenia in the literature closely parallels the rise of the City of the Future—its
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industrialization, rapid transportation, technologies, medias, wars. Even that term—
schizophrenia—is a relatively new addition to the literature, coined in 1908 by the Swiss
psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler to intimate a splitting (“skhizein” in Greek) of the mind (“phren”).
His was an attempt to distinguish from prevalent notions of a generalized “insanity” and a
murkily defined “dementia praecox” an observable condition that he believed was the direct
result of the dissociation between personality, thinking, memory, and perception. For Bleuler,
also an ardent eugenicist, this “skhizein” was an aberration of heredity, and should be
systematically deleted from society. “The more severely burdened should not propagate
themselves,” he wrote in his influential 1923 textbook Lehrbuch der Psychiatrie. “If we do
nothing but make mental and physical cripples capable of propagating themselves, and the
healthy stocks have to limit the number of their children because so much has to be done for the
maintenance of others…our race must rapidly deteriorate.” It should come as no surprise that,
not a decade later, the sterilization he argued for would find a welcome home in a German state
that quickly devolved into its own mass madness. By 1933, the practice of compulsory
sterilization in cases of congenital mental defect, schizophrenia, manic-depressive psychosis,
hereditary epilepsy, hereditary chorea, hereditary blindness, hereditary deafness, severe physical
deformity, and severe alcoholism was signed into German law. As a result of Gesetz zur
Verhütung erbkranken Nachwuchses or “Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased
Offspring,” roughly 62,000 were sterilized in the program’s first year of existence. By 1939, over
400,000 patients had suffered the same fate.
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The Human Condition also requires verbs like rape, torture, sodomize, slit, force-feed,
overdose.
The Human Condition also requires nouns like chemical burns, smoke, flames,
compulsory sterilization.
Jack was short for Jacqueline. In many ways, the bastardization prefigured the trajectory
of her life. Hers was a constantly truncated existence. The momentum of promising events never
carried through to fruition. Marriage sputtered out into divorce. Motherhood became a congested
debacle. And even her body, once the shapely and athletic figure that befit an accomplished
lifeguard, began to fester with sickness and disease. As she aged, her once-striking femininity
felt increasingly distant and foreign, like a costume she had worn to the castle ball, and by the
time I was old enough to have memories of her, whatever remained of Jacqueline was frayed and
tattered, wholly subsumed by a woman very much so Jack.
When I moved to New York, it was to become a writer. Obviously. This goes mostly
without saying. It should say enough that I’m often embarrassed to admit it. That I have
contemplated leaving this fact out entirely. Like most (all) writers, I was quick to busy myself
with every verb except the one that had brought me there. I ate. I talked. I masturbated. I read. I
watched. I viewed. I photographed. I walked. I ran. I subwayed. I bussed. I cabbed. Rare nights,
usually in a small room that was permeated with Little Italy’s garlic aroma, I copulated. For
some months, I also did this in an area of the city called Spanish Harlem. New York was the type
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of place where you could copulate your way around the world in far less than 80 days.
Somewhere in between these other verbs, I slept. In a twin bed. With no flat sheet. I couldn’t be
bothered. New York was more or less a claustrophobic tunnel from one verb to the next. There
was barely enough room to breathe. Homeostasis was under constant threat from basement
shows and gallery openings and trips to the ER and fisticuffs and birthday cakes and rat traps and
yellow snow and rolling blackouts and limited subway service. It was only when I had exhausted
every other option that I began to write. And then, only poorly. With brief spouts of mediocre.
I was not alone. Others had come to write, too. It was not hard to find them if you knew
where to look. I’m sure they did it as infrequently as I did. I saw them on walks. I saw them
jogging. I saw them doing dead-stop push-ups in Gravesend Park. I saw them eating. Sushi.
Submarines. Cereal. Mostly, I saw them drinking. French vodkas. Japanese whiskey. White
Russians. Long Island Ice Teas. Smoking. Snorting. Calling home. Calling it a day. Calling it
quits. Riding subways. Busses. Splurging on taxicabs. Giving in to galoshes. A midday
replacement umbrella. New York at the turn of the century was where writers came to stop
writing. Where they got jobs in mail rooms. Where they got second jobs at coffee shops. Rub and
tugs. Print and copies. Juggling. Breathing fire. Laying bricks. Moving furniture. Disc jockeying
obscure Nigerian dream pop at even more obscure password pajama parties in Jamaica
basements that spiraled four-ish stories under Portland cement. Like most, we did some of our
best living just before dawn. Snaking between sidewalk pressure washes and sleeping bag
encampments. Worming up the down escalators. Fishing day-old everything bagels out of
dumpsters. Lobbing them like frisbees into mouths agape. Double dare skinny dipping into
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Pelham Bay for a jackpot of twenty dollar bills. When we slept, it was on top of one another.
Sandwiched between one another. Occasionally, inside of one another. This was the same, I
think, for everyone else in New York, too. The sanitation workers. The train conductors. The
newsstand proprietors. The docents. The coeds. The dropouts. The shoe shiners. Hawkers of
Nuts4Nuts. Caretakers at the old folks’ homes. Livery drivers. Crustacean merchants.
Fishmongers. Advertising executives. Silk vendors. Improvisational comedians. Fumigators.
Pederasts. Priests. Podiatrists. We were none of us special, even if we pretended to be. The city
made sure of it. It was a circuit. A billowing ecosystem. A rusting food chain. A robust,
undulating membrane that spasmed of its own accord, like the steady pulse of a rotting corpse
teeming with hungry maggots. We each but played our tiny part in what was otherwise a
tumultuous abyss. Agile, mobile and dynamic in every detail. Like a gigantic machine.
During those two fevered years that I tried desperately and in vain to write about ATHAS
STOMPER, I grew increasingly convinced both that my future depended on it, and that one of my
peers would inevitably steal it out from under me.
I know how this sounds, too.
And yet.
It is a looming fear particular to those of us tasked with writing stories that someone else
will write our story first. Before we get a chance to. Before we get around to it. That we may
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spend so much time thinking about the story—maybe even telling people the story, trying out
different approaches and alternate endings in our head, for weeks, for months, for years—that by
the time we actually write it, someone else already has. I was no exception to this fear. To this
procrastination. I’m not sure now how many times I had trampled ATHAS STOMPER underfoot
before I realized it. How many times on my way to the 116
th
Street subway station, on my way to
work, on my way to Koronet for late night, tray-sized slabs of pizza, or on my weekly run clear
around the Jackie Onassis—how many times I traipsed obliviously over ATHAS STOMPER before I
even took notice. Before it ever even occurred to me as tangible entity of the world. Before it
solidified in my consciousness. Even now, I do not remember ATHAS STOMPER as a bolt of
lightning but, rather, a gentle mist. As a trickle, not a stream. No a-ha! No eureka! No theoretical
Big Bang. Even the calmer streets of New York City, like this portion of Amsterdam Avenue, are
host to a constant circus of one-off spectacles and conspicuous displays of idiosyncratic behavior
such that ATHAS STOMPER spent many weeks (months?) lounging in the margins, out of sight and
mind, subservient to a brigade of teenage skateboarders, a motley crew of law apprentices, the
chicane of delivery boys on bikes, the yanked handcarts of FedEx employees, etc. ATHAS
STOMPER did not strike me like an anvil from the sky so much as it accumulated in my periphery,
accruing subliminal presence in the same way birdsong does, or like the aroma of fresh bread
wafting from the corner bakery into a predawn crack of window. The way I describe it now is to
say that ATHAS STOMPER appeared gradually like one of those stereoscopic Magic Eye posters of
my youth that requires simultaneously both an intense concentration and a casual, relaxed,
mostly cross-eyed stare in order to lift from its two-dimensions the hidden three-dimensional
image lurking within:
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ATHAS STOMPER was hidden just like these dinosaurs, in plain sight. Out in broad daylight for
any and all to see, if only they’d look. If only they’d look down. A curious, stolid, four-syllable
name—phrase? rank? title? locale? inside joke?…I had no clue—scrawled for posterity into a
unassuming square of Uptown sidewalk on a nondescript block of Amsterdam Avenue around
the corner from the small room I rented at the Shelburne-Hall Apartments.
According to the American Concrete Institute (ACI), concrete is the world’s most
consumed man-made material and second only to water of all materials consumed by man on
Earth. It is created by the rather rudimentary process of combining three main ingredients: water,
aggregates (like sand, gravel, and stone), and Portland cement, a binding agent derived from
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Figure 12
heating and grinding limestone which was named in 1824 by its inventor, Joseph Aspdin, for its
physical resemblance to stone quarried on the Isle of Portland in Dorset, England. And while we
tend to think of concrete as a modern technology that has fundamentally transformed our society,
its origins can be traced back at least 10,000 years to the mortar used in the construction of
monuments and dwellings in the Neolithic settlement of Nevali Çore located in what is today
southeastern Turkey. Archeologists and anthropologists alike surmise that these cultures were
some of the first to realize that certain composite soils were capable of hardening after heavy
rains and exposure to the heat of fire or sun. The mortars that resulted were different in
composition, but functioned in much the same way our concrete does today. In many respects,
over the intervening epochs the process has changed both completely and none at all. In fact, it is
dichotomies just like this that characterize our often complicated relationship to concrete. It is
both ancient and modern. It is both smooth and rough. It is both natural and artificial. It is both
cheap and costly. It is both suburban and industrial. It is both liquid and solid. This (for lack of a
better term) fluidity has leant concrete a polarizing mystique—while it is celebrated as the most
ubiquitous manmade substance on Earth, it has been condemned for everything from its
deleterious effects on the environment to the way in which its omnipresence dehumanizes and
divorces us from the natural world. “What then should be the Aesthetic of concrete?”, asked the
American architect Frank Lloyd Wright in 1927. “Is it Stone? Yes and No. Is it Plaster? Yes and
No. Is it Brick or Tile? Yes and No. Is it Cast Iron? Yes and No. Poor Concrete! Still looking for
its own at the hands of Man.”

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For ATHAS STOMPER, concrete was its canvas. It is the same with so many other messages
left in wet cement. All across the world, the fresh pour of concrete has become our modern day
cave wall. The blank slate upon which we tell the story of our lives. The same impulse that
compelled our ancestors to portray on limestone cliffs a hunt for wild animals is the one that
draws us now to concrete to profess the permanence of a new love. It is where ALL COPS ARE
BASTARDS. It is where JESUS LOVES YOU and GOD HATES FAGS and MEN ARE PIGS
and HELL HATH NO FURY . It is where, on the curbs of San Francisco, we imprint street names
like Market and Divisadero. And where, as a toddler, I made handprints with my sister to christen
our new home. Even with the warning signs (“Caution: Wet Cement!”) and preventative ropes
and barriers, a pool of freshly poured concrete is often too tempting for even the most obedient
passerby to resist. The allure derives, I think, from both its infinite possibility and enduring
permanence. From the fact that we all have something to say. The fact that from time to time, we
all feel compelled to hurl our voice into the void. From the fact that we’re guaranteed a captive—
if also transient—audience. For a brief moment, concrete takes any shape we give it. It is plastic
and pliable and bends and flexes to accommodate whatever shapes and symbols we impress upon
it. But when, in due course, the concrete sets, it sets for posterity. Permanent. Forever. Ad
infinitum. Like a tattoo or a trilobite or the rings of an ancient redwood, our concrete has become
a living record—proof of our all-too-human existence. Proof of our feats and follies. It is both
canvas and museum. It collects the whimsy of one-off individual expressions into a colossal
worldwide archive that spans geographies, cultures, languages, and even chronologies. It is at
once both art and history. It is a way to live on even after death. A talisman. A testament. A
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shrine. I see WEiRD HAROLD -74- everyday on my walk to work and wonder, Who was
Harold? and What was weird about Harold? and Is Harold still alive?

!
We are so thoroughly conditioned to the grey, omnipresent, utilitarian form of concrete
that we can be forgiven how often we overlook the details trapped in its content. Concrete is as
commonplace as the sky. It outfits the day-to-day as unceremoniously as the air we breathe.
Concrete is our homes. Concrete is our schools. It is our playground, our workplace, our
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Figure 13
“jungle.” But it is also our boulevards, our sidewalks, our bus stop benches, our public park
picnic tables. Both our prisons and our churches. Both our bridges and our fences. Both a means
and an end. Its overwhelming abundance negates our direct attention, like the sun, like the beat
of our heart. We take concrete for granted. As if it were a fact of life. Elemental. So that those
phrases we flippantly scrawl into the faces of our wet cements are treated like an afterthought. A
blemish. A hastily improvised defect. Barely worth our attention, if even the ground underneath
our feet.
Which is why when I moved to New York City I passed daily over ATHAS STOMPER for
some considerable amount of time without noticing. It was as invisible to me as the individual
brick which we lose to the synecdoche of the entire building. Like the metal New York City
wastepaper baskets or the streetlights or the fire hydrants or the standpipes, it failed to capture
my imagination. Failed to stand out amongst the frenzy. The city is an endless scroll of
uniformity. Proof that we have tamed that natural world via steamroller and standard issue
fabrication and mechanized reproduction. The asphalt, the glass, the handrails, the honk of horns,
the sirens—it all congeals like a backdrop upon which we improvise the color and the shape of
our lives. But, like a hangnail, or like a stubborn popcorn kernel sandwiched between molars, as
soon as I accidentally discovered ATHAS STOMPER, I couldn’t ignore it ever again. I felt
compelled by it. Magnetized. Obsessed. Were I not, I think, trying to keep the (thick) lenses of
my eyeglasses free of the sideways rain that typifies autumn in New York by averting my eye-
level gaze ground-wards, I might never have seen ATHAS STOMPER. Or, I suppose, I might very
well have been stooped to tie a loosened shoelace (I loathe tying my shoes) and was brought
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face-to-face with ATHAS STOMPER in the process. I have no clear memory of my first blush with
ATHAS STOMPER. But what to most others would have proven an unremarkable, throw-away
observation, the kind of odd-but-ultimately-forgettable detail that protrudes as if at random into
countless moments of our day, instead stuck with me like a stubborn, barbed splinter of the mind.
Thereafter, walking home, grocery bags in hand, I would glance briefly to acknowledge ATHAS
STOMPER. Passing with a small group of oblivious friends, I would find a way to shift my gaze
momentarily towards ATHAS STOMPER without calling attention to it. I felt as if ATHAS STOMPER
could sense that I was near, that it would be able to tell if I shuffled past it without at least paying
psychic deference. But I always did so slyly, and anyone watching my comportment would have
been none the wiser. Because it is also true that I felt secretive about ATHAS STOMPER. That I felt
proprietary about ATHAS STOMPER. The more I traversed the otherwise standard issue sidewalk
that housed ATHAS STOMPER—going this way to the library, going that way to the Apple Tree
Deli—the more I felt I owned ATHAS STOMPER. That, like a child with an invisible friend, ATHAS
STOMPER belonged to me. That ATHAS STOMPER was mine. No matter how distracted I was or
how late I happened to be running, when I approached this particular slab of sidewalk I felt the
pleasant reassurance of routine and the local’s-only pride of having folded even the most obscure
detail of my new neighborhood deep into my consciousness. ATHAS STOMPER straddled a flimsy
line between daily occurrence and daily acquaintance, and quickly became a permanent,
reassuring fixture of my everyday life. The way others might feel partial to an emblematic city
monument, the way an outdoorsman might feel possessive about a harrowing summit, or how a
surfer might claim intimacy with a particular wave or reef or break, I felt as though these two
words which had been engraved (it seemed) by either the fat tip of an index finger or (maybe) the
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blunt end of a wayward stick had been written specifically with me in mind. Had been left to
harden there in that cement for me. On my behalf. Like a suggestion. Like a set of enigmatic
instructions. A purpose.
The first recorded instance of what would later be termed paranoid schizophrenia did not
appear in the literature until 1810, when John Haslem, the apothecary at London’s Royal
Bethlem Hospital, published Illustrations of Madness: Exhibiting a Singular Case of Insanity,
and a No Less Remarkable Difference in Medical Opinion: Developing the Nature of Assailment,
and the Manner of Working Events; with a Description of the Tortures Experienced by Bomb-
Bursting, Lobster-Cracking, and Lengthening the Brain. It was a book that documented the
curious case of one James Tilly Matthews, a former British tea broker, envoy to France, and
Girondist peace activist during the Napoleonic wars who was committed to “Bedlam” (as it was
more infamously known) for thirteen years after accusing a Lord Liverpool of treason from the
public gallery in the House of Commons. The “difference in medical opinion” that Haslem
attempts to adjudicate arose when Matthews and his devout family contended that, after more
than a decade in custody, he had been fully rehabilitated and obtained the independent medical
opinion of two outside doctors who decreed that Matthews should no longer be confined to
Bedlam. Indignant in his response, Haslem recounts the intense persecutory delusions that
Matthews told him over the years, and which Matthews insisted were real—in particular that that
he had become the victim of a novel apparatus he called an “Air Loom,” a torture device
operated by a gang of vengeful Jacobin terrorists capable of “weaving” toxic, invisible “airs” or
gasses into Matthews’ body and brain.
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The book describes in great (and putrid) detail often quoted in Matthews’ own voice the
inner workings of the malicious Air Loom, and is “embellished” by this “curious plate” in which
Matthews, a skilled draftsman, diagramed the manner in which the gang, lead by a certain “King
Bill,” used “Pneumatic Chemistry” to “assail” him from “some apartment near London Wall.”
The Air Loom Gang, which also included a colorful cast of characters like Jack the
Schoolmaster, the Glove Woman, and the Middle Man, reportedly operated their weapon using
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Figure 14
“different preparations” comprised of “[s]eminal fluid, male and female,” “effluvia of dogs,”
“stinking human breath,” and “gaz [sic] from the anus of the horse” to wreak havoc on Matthews
as he sat in his nearby cell. The diagram itself is the first known illustration made by an asylum
patient, and is chilling for many reasons, not least of which that it provides such a crystalline
image of the first known “influencer machine”—the psychiatric term for an imagined, diabolic
device often just outside the patient’s technical comprehension that is reported to terrorize or
“influence” the patient from some distant locale. Matthews (“X”) is depicted on the left edge of
the drawing, trapped in a spectrum of the magnetic “vapors” he claimed traveled directly (and
invisibly) from the Air Loom into his body, and which produced a myriad of reportedly painful
effects which included:
• fluid locking (“a locking or constriction of the fibers of the root of the tongue, laterally,
by which the readiness of speech is impeded”)
• cutting soul from sense (“a spreading of the magnetic warp, chilled in its expansion, from
the root of the nose, diffused under the basis of the brain, as if a veil were interposed; so
that the sentiments of the heart can have no communication with the operations of the
intellect”)
• thigh-talking (“to effect this, they contrive so to direct their voice-saying on the external
part of the thigh, that the person assailed is conscious that his organ of hearing, with all
its sensibility, is lodged in that situation”)
• kiteing (“a very singular and distressing mode of assailment, and much practiced by the
gang…as boys raise a kit in the air, so these wretches, by means of the air-loom and
magnetic impregnations, contrive to lift into the brain some particular idea, which floats
and undulates in the intellect for hours together; and how much soever the person assailed
may wish to direct his mind to other objects, he finds himself unable”), and
• lobster-cracking (“this is an external pressure of the magnetic atmosphere surrounding
the person assailed, so as to stagnate his circulation, impede his vital motions, and
produce instant death”)
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James Tilly Matthews is the original poster child for all the shut-ins we envision wearing
tin foil top hats. He is the progenitor of the tooth filling prophecy. The mold cast for every voice-
hearing, hallway-whispering, communer-with-the-dead and basement-dwelling conspiracy
theorist. It can be tempting to read Illustrations of Madness as a blueprint for our future
schizophrenias. As a sort of how-to manual for broken brains. Because it is meant to
sensationalize Matthews’ fragile mental health, it can seem almost pornographic in its celebration
of his eccentricity. “After the commission of murder or treason, it would be considered an
inadequate defence [sic] for the [Matthews] to alledge [sic] that he had been irresistibly actuated
by the dexterous maneuvers of Bill, or the Middle man,” writes Haslem, “nor is it at all probable,
that the accurate records of Jack the Schoolmaster would be admitted as evidence in a court of
law.” Matthews, for his part, while given the luxury of direct quotes, never himself published a
retort of his own that may have invalidated Haslem’s account. Instead, Matthews became a
placeholder for schizophrenics for years to come. A model. A mold. And since then, we have so
thoroughly fetishized the behaviors and paranoid delusions first made popular by John Haslem’s
book that it is, in part, also responsible for the form our madness takes today. Those teetering on
the edge of sanity are now primed—either from Haslem’s account directly, or from the
psychiatric stereotypes it inspired—by a trove of rich and well-documented schizophrenic tropes.
But in our more compassionate moments, I think it can be quite moving to think of James Tilly
Matthews as a man held against his will in a harrowing jail full of peers suffering from various
degrees of mental distress, the echo of outbursts punctuated by the redundant clank of chains and
rusted bars slamming shut. I think it is important to imagine the lengths a mind incarcerated for
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over a decade will go to invent a logic that can explain its increasingly bleak prospects. How, in
many ways, the Air Loom and its gang are the mind’s benevolent way of making a plausible
excuse for the implausible actions of the human animals so hellbent on imprisoning Matthews
against his will.
When I enveloped my half-naked Grandma Jack into the safety of my after school
embrace, I was either fifteen- or sixteen-years-old and also utterly unaware that for the majority
of her adult life, my grandma suffered from the paranoid schizophrenic delusion that a man had
somehow harnessed electromagnetic and/or radio waves and was using them to beam evil, self-
destructive thoughts into her brain. I was completely unaware that, in response to a frantic
complaint my father fielded from the principal of East Orange High School, he had forcefully
moved my Grandma Jack from her home in New Jersey to his adopted hometown across the
country in Redondo Beach, California. I was, even then while I was wrapping my fifteen- and/or
sixteen-year-old arms around my grandmother, completely in the dark that before she came to
California under the pretense of raising me, she had a spate of psychotic episodes in which she
would talk out loud to this man—“The man! The man!”—in front of the classes of high school
teenagers she taught during her stint as a substitute in the East Orange Unified School District. I
was wholly unaware that she was (heavily?) medicated the entire time she lived in California—
all of those years I spent in her lone care after school, all those long weekends, those hours she
babysat me for the brunt of yelling bouts my parents had during their protracted divorce. She was
on a highly regimented daily dose of Haldol except, perhaps, those last few days when later we
came to suspect she had stopped taking her pills and had, instead, began medicating with beer.
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All through my youth, during which she would often pick me up from school in her two-tone
used Cadillac, the smoke from her Marlboro Lights accumulating like a thick sheet of stratus
clouds hemmed in by the roof of the car, aerated wisps near the crack in her driver’s side window
streaming out behind us like a chemtrail, those years when we would get McDonald’s drive-thru
on Two for Tuesday without fail, where every Easter season was a daily Cadbury egg, years
where her body contorted around the rigors of lupus, where I remember the the first infection she
suffered on her elbow which blew it up with yellow pus to the size of cantaloupe, where I also
remember the second infection that blew it up even larger, years where she wore those oversized
amber-colored sunglasses and innumerable hats and always an androgynous, chromatically
colored sweatsuit, regardless of the weather, because she was allergic to the sun, because she was
so embarrassed by how swollen her jowls would get as a result of it, years where her slick black
hair was always pulled back tightly onto her scalp with the help of VO5 and black barrettes into
a small, clenched bun on the back of her head, which she always parted down the middle, like
she was taking tonsorial cues from water buffalo, years where we played Candyland, where we
played Concentration, where we played Hungry, Hungry Hippos, years where she watched me
play basketball, soccer, tee-ball, years where we read books in bed after homemade Neapolitan
ice cream sundaes with maraschino cherries, years where she became my pillow, my bed, where
she toted me around the neighborhood in that flimsy stroller singing me “Twinkle, Twinkle,
Little Star” until I fell deep into sleep—during all of this time, I was wholly unaware that my
Grandma Jack suffered, and suffered intensely, from schizophrenia.
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I remember the fragility of my grandmother’s coffee-with-cream-colored skin. I
remember the considerable elasticity of the skin near her elbow. I remember how paper-thin her
skin was, how the veins of her forearm were brought up so near the surface that they created a
series of rolling hills which you could read like Braille. The way her skin encapsulated her flesh
in excess suggested a more supple past. A far more robust corporeal history now well along the
path of withering away. Jack’s skin made her a true raisin in the sun. She was constantly
crawling in skin wrinkled by a slow procession of long, vitamin-D-rich California days. Hers
was skin consigned to permanent prune. As if she was desiccated by the incessant onslaught of
ultraviolet. I sometimes wonder how many drinking fountains her skin denied her the
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Figure 15
opportunity to drink from. I wonder how often in her life her skin refused her the right to be
served. How many piggish men mistook the gentle stain of her skin for an invitation to wolf
whistle. To pinch or grab it without repercussion. To push her up against the cold flat of an office
wall and run their filthy hands over it, their sad, sweaty palms leaving behind a sour trail like the
crawl of post-rain escargot. And what moments like this did to skin. How it deflated skin. Took
away the luster of skin. Blemished skin. Tenderized it. Her skin hung loosely about her bones
like the jowls of a bloodhound. Limp. Because of this, her movements were punctuated by the
sway and jiggle of the flesh and organs and lymph contained so promiscuously inside. Her gait
possessed a posterior echo. Her gesticulations reverberated. It was a redundant body language
glutted with stutter. Scooping ice cream or writing a check at the grocery store, her tricep swung
to and fro like the pendulum of an aging grandfather clock. She was a study in excess inertia.
Aftershock. Like a bowl of human jello. Her birthday suit belonged to the wardrobe of more
nutritious times. It was evidence of having once eaten better and more frequently. Now, she
occupied her skin like an afterparty. A limp balloon scuttling across the streamer-strewn dance
floor between the bristles of a janitor’s broom. And from time to time, Jack’s skin erupted in
lesions oozing with pus. Later I would learn that this was the result of lupus, an autoimmune
disease that (for her) encouraged the somatic cells of her body to inflame when exposed to direct
sunlight. As a child, though, the phonic relationship between this disease—“lupus”—and the
volcanic manner in which it manifests itself suggested to me that my grandmother was
perennially swollen with pus. Like a Boston creme donut piped full of too much custard. I was
cautions when I hugged her, nervous that I might squeeze too hard and pop her, the pressure
forcing a new fissure into the brittle surface of her skin like the burst of an aging dam.
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It was my Grandma Jack that first suggested I write. Or, at the very least, it was my
Grandma Jack that made sure writing happened. I do not remember pestering her. I do not
remember any tantrums thrown for want of pen or paper. I do not recall any irresistible
compulsion to tell stories. Nonetheless, when I was seven-years-old she walked me down the
three blocks to Arico’s Hallmark Shop where, either acceding to my nagging childhood request
or as a result of her own prevailing teacherly impulse, I was allowed to pick out a(n effeminate)
teal-and-salmon-colored diary designed with a decidedly early-90s aesthetic. Think: Saved by the
Bell. Think: Peach Pit à la 90210.
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Figure 16
It came complete with an attached locking system that I’ve long since forced into opening
without having to supply whatever code once kept it private. The only condition, so far as I
remember there being one, was that if she was going to fork over her hard-earned cash for a
fancy diary, it was my job to write in it everyday. To keep daily tabs on my life so that (much)
later I could look back and see how far I had come. Which, as I write this, is a comical grand
sum of approximately three miles in thirty years. Give or take. From one side of the oil refinery
to the other. The first entry is from “Friday 29 March, 1991.” The date is written in my
grandmother’s distinctive cursive which seemed always to struggle against itself, like every pen
she ever held was a fish trying to squirm its way back to water. From there, I take over the
narration with the sort of nuance-less printing that hasn’t yet freed itself from the residual effect
of the dotted line assistance offered in elementary school. My first entry:
Today I went to the Mall to get My Diary. In two days it will be Easter! I will pray to God
for what He has done! I will also pray for my girlfriend, Natalie.
Another way to say it is that I moved to New York City to become a liar. Obviously. Or,
rather, to become a better liar. As a child, I was exposed to the lies of many liars and dreamt one
day of being able to lie just like them, or better. Some liars told such incredible lies that it was
impossible not to believe them. At that age, being lied to felt like it sliced open the belly of the
world and let all its guts topple out. These lies were often more honest than the truth. So it
happened that I started to lie, too. First in small ways, and then bigger and bigger. I lied about a
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brave knight felled in battle by a happenstance rockslide. I lied about being raised by wild
Indians who ate bison raw in the Apache desert. I lied at school. I lied during our infrequent
dinners at the dinner table. And these lies did not get me in trouble like the truth often did.
Instead, people seemed to like my lies. Teachers praised my lies. They gave me As for the lies I
told them. And my mother said that one day maybe I’d become a great liar, too, like the liars I
admired.
My fascination with ATHAS STOMPER quickly grew into an obsession. I often found
myself ambling or chewing or doing laundry lost deep in daydream about who and/or what and/
or where ATHAS STOMPER could be. The words were catalytic. Elliptical. I played Nabokovian
word games with their syllables, letting the double “ă” of ATHAS morph into some soft-
vowelled rib-nudging “a-ha.” And STOMPER became embodied, my feet thrusting slightly
harder onto the pavement as I stomped the soles of my rubber sneakers into the word, as if it was
a direction, as if I was taking orders—“stomp here!” There was a kinetic relationship between
the two words. They collided with an inverted gravity. ATHAS had no precedent. I had never
before encountered the word. STOMPER, on the other hand, created a clear and violent image
which smashed a large boot directly into the center of my mind’s eye. This tension imbued the
word with an extreme flexibility. And though it was not nonsensical, ATHAS STOMPER did not
strike me as a whimsical phrase made up on the spot. While the etching occupied a physical
presence in this world, the words themselves seemed to emanate from a different one altogether.
They were a portal that sent me on long, imaginative ruminations across time and space. It’s
proximity to “atlas” was saturated in associative meanings. I pushed ATHAS around an imaginary
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book of maps in my head, seeing if it fit better in, say, Iceland or Peru, if it belonged more to The
Bronze Age or that of Aquarius. It was only naturally that I began to tell myself stories about
ATHAS STOMPER. That it became the impetus for a folklore entirely of my own creation. That it
suggested nebulous landmasses, exotic logics, a mutating cast of (mostly bearded) characters.
How could it not? This is what they mean by the suggestive power of language. How words may
in and of themselves contain enough momentum to propel our thoughts into and beyond the
margins. In one particularly recurrent scenario, ATHAS STOMPER was an adventurous pronoun, the
first and last name of a Nordic warrior garbed in pelts and skin from times bygone who roamed
the earth with a small splash of blood permanently blotted into the lapel of a leather vest fastened
with shards of heirloom mastodon bone. He cultivated the type of beard that harbored miniature
icicles during the harsh winter months, and his were hands gnarled and callused from building
the sturdy wooden vessels used to explore the floes and bergs populating the waters he was
tasked with colonizing. This fantasy imagined STOMPER as some sort of official rank that
ATHAS had attained, bestowed upon him for an uncanny ability to effect violent heel-of-boot
death unto various foreign-tongued natives that, from time to time, threatened the expeditions
ATHAS helmed. Otherwise, STOMPER was a sort of tribal denomination, a communal surname
that commemorated bonds thicker than bloodline. I could maneuver ATHAS STOMPER between
plots as I saw fit, as if he was a haggard, world-weary puppet. The saga that most closely befit
the stereotype concerned unsheathing swords, avenging the slaughter of innocents, felling trees,
funeral pyres, spits of roasting game—venison, bear, etc. I could insinuate crowns and thrones
and dowries and backstabbing and steins of thick, frothy mead into this version of ATHAS
STOMPER without batting an eye. In fact, everything fit so snugly around those words that it
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annoyed me. Try as I might, I found it nearly impossible to nudge ATHAS STOMPER out of the
confines exhausted by sagas like Beowulf and the Edda and Heimskringla. I kept telling myself a
story I already knew. Each episode played out as a battle of man versus: man versus nature; man
versus animal; man versus man. At some point, it was inevitable that a tribune of elders would
gather to make strong decrees regarding the the tribe. And despite the imaginary fact that this
imaginary ATHAS was indeed the most venerated imaginary mercenary the imaginary STOMPER
clan had ever known—though he was responsible for spearheading the many settlements that had
begun to thrive on the coast of what is today Nova Scotia, though he had single-handedly
vanquished both exotic men and wild beasts with well-timed thrusts of his ancient, hand-me-
down saber—this tribune of elders was left no other option, given the severity and given the gaul
—the sheer audacity—of his carnal transgression but to banish ATHAS to the hinterlands to live
out the remainder of his days by himself, in complete isolation from the other STOMPERs so as
never again to kiss and/or copulate with his one true, illicit, and obviously impossible…
It occurs to me now that perhaps all of this preamble really amounts to an attempt to
excuse, or at the very least explain, the fact that I have for so many years now blown what should
be little more than a passing observation so egregiously out of proportion. Maybe deep down I
am embarrassed that I have willfully ceded so much of my time and energy to a goddamn slab of
concrete. However, the more that I assess the situation frankly, the less I think I owe anyone this
sort of preemptive defense. It is truer that it is precisely the minor details of the modern world
which most powerfully catch our eye. It is the fortune we best remember of our Chinese take-out,
not the meal.
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Enumerated in the list of substances that James Tilly Matthews reportedly believed were
used by the Air Loom Gang to operate their torturous Air Loom was a curious ingredient he
called “Egyptian snuff,” a “dusty vapor” that was “extremely nauseous” whose “composition
[had] not been hitherto ascertained.” According to Matthews,
This disgusting odour [sic] is exclusively employed during sleep, when, by their dream-
workings, they have placed him, as a solitary wanderer, in the marshes near the mouth of
the river Nile; not at that season when its waters bring joy and refreshment, but at its
lowest ebb, when the heat is most oppressive, and the muddy and stagnant pools diffuse a
putrid and suffocating stench; —the eye is likewise equally disgusted with the face of the
country, which is made to assume a hateful tinge, resembling the dirty and cold blue of a
scorbutic ulcer. From this cheerless scene they suddenly awake him, when he finds his
nostrils stuffed, his mouth furred, and himself nearly choaked [sic] by the poisonous
effects of their Egyptian stuff.
So far as any travel documents suggest, the closest Matthews ever got to the Nile would
have been Ezekiel 30:12, which describes that stretch of Egypt in omnipotent decrees that are
just as grave:
And I will dry up the Nile and will sell the land into the hand of evildoers; I will bring
desolation upon the land and everything in it, by the hand of foreigners; I am the Lord; I have
spoken.
As fate would have it, the apartment I found myself renting in New York was situated in a
different but no less desolate environment located on the gently curved northernmost portion of
Morningside Drive, so named because it provided the western boundary to Morningside Park in
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an area of uptown Manhattan named Morningside Heights that is noted most often these days for
playing host to Columbia University. It was in this pocket of apartments that flanked Amsterdam
Avenue between 110
th
and 125
th
Streets that the University Apartment Housing (UAH) division
of Columbia University Residential Operations began a controversial practice of gobbling up
vacated apartments, contributing to the systematic gentrification of an area that once provided a
stately overlook of neighboring Harlem, and where it housed, amongst other graduate students,
most of its starry-eyed “writers,” and where it just so happened to find a room for me in a
standard-issue three bedroom shared with a Corsican banker and a German law professor on the
fourth floor of the Shelburne-Hall apartments located at 110 Morningside Drive #45. I had never
before been issued an apartment number that required more than one alphanumeric, and though
the mental math was difficult, I began to think about the dense concentration of human life
encapsulated by Shelburne-Hall’s six stories, eight units per floor, three+ occupants per unit.
There is a type of violence we perform whenever humans see fit to organize and index
themselves with numbers. I am thinking back through history. The practice has always prefigured
suffering. Penal colonies. Holocausts. Etc. Serialization denies us our rugged individuality, or at
least begins to melt away at our unique snowflakiness. Quantification negates qualification. To
combat the inevitable feeling of being jailed—of being stupid enough to pay, and pay
exorbitantly for a tiny, de-facto cell on the fourth floor of Shelburne-Hall—I instinctively began
to look up. As in: to the sky. Because the buildings in this portion of the city tended not to
explode so vehemently into the stratosphere, I spent my first few days in my new neighborhood
marveling at the generous amount of blue sky that surrounded it. While in every other corner of
the city I felt imposed upon, felt the insignificance of my meager life confirmed by the
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disproportionate stature of my slight frame compared to the massive skyscrapers that dwarfed
me, I took no small joy in the dome-like quality of the autumn sky that crowned Morningside
Heights. In its expanse and gentle stream of cumulus clouds, the sky there reminds those that
take the time to look up that the natural world, which the city works so hard to crowd out and
control, persists. Nature, of course, has its ways of exacting revenge. Not long into my New York
Stint, I found myself lounging one afternoon on one of the public benches which overlooked
Morningside Park, taking, as it were, a breather from the requisite to-and-fro of home goods
procurement necessitated by a bullish cross-country move. My arms were red and awkwardly
grooved from toting reinforced plastic bags brimful with heavy detergents and lamps and
awkwardly-shaped packets of plastic hangars. My legs were taut with the ache of walking block
after block with bookshelves and rugs pilfered from nearby rubbish heaps. Even in that
exhaustion, though, New York still felt like a possibility. Like a pot beginning to boil. A
cauldron. “I sat down on a park bench that overlooks the overgrowth spreading all over
Morningside Park,” I would writer later that day to my mother in an email,
my apartment building (“Shelburne-Hall” it says over the doorway) behind me, hot sun,
smell of piss, a distant FM radio, etc. No one cleans this park. The children play and it is
clean where they are, but the rest of the place is reeling from years of underuse (or,
perhaps, overuse of users). Anyway, I’m sitting there, just jotting down some thoughts
about being all here in the big old city and not knowing too many souls in this great
sweltering (humid!) monstrosity, feeling small but hopeful, on the verge, or something
like that, when, out of nowhere, fwoooooof: a foot-long rat, slick with some unidentified
cola-colored moisture, hops up onto its hind legs from (literally) between my feet, tosses
its head in both directions as if crossing a dangerous boulevard with no crosswalk, and
then scurries onto the iron fence that rings the entirety of the park. This rat was an
emblem. My own private Diminutive Statu(r)e of Liberty. I took it as an initiation, as a
handshake, as a way of New York reminding me in no uncertain terms: in this city, it is
the vermin who have won.
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Years later, I learn that years before, in the cold winter of 1958, a young, pre-fame, down-
on-his-luck, $200-to-his-name Hunter S. Thompson came to live one floor directly above me,
decompressing in a friend’s room vacated for the winter holiday in apartment #53 of the
Shelburne-Hall apartments. Like me, he had come chasing some ghost hope of acquiring “fame
and fortune” by “wrestl[ing] with the literary muse for the rest of [his] days.” (293) Quaint.
Romantic. Etc. “Frankly,” he wrote in a candid letter to a high school teacher back in St. Louis,
“I have no taste for either poverty or honest labor, so writing is the only recourse left me.”
Because he was twenty-years-old, he spent what little money he had on absinthe, and because he
spent what little money he had on absinthe, he had none left over for gas to fuel the jalopy car he
drove up from the Jersey Shore. The “Huntermobile” he called it. It sat idly collecting parking
tickets somewhere on Morningside Drive where nearly fifty years later I would encounter my
initiation rat. He plowed hopelessly into the city in search of some sort of job writing for one of
its hallowed newspapers, but sputtered about, spinning his wheels, watching college basketball
games at Madison Square Garden with tickets comped by friends instead. Just past New Year’s,
he hammered out letters back home and to friends and to young women he hoped would join him
in New York, excoriating the city with which he was simultaneously falling in love:
Anyone who could live in this huge reclaimed tenement called Manhattan for more than a
year, without losing all vestiges of respect for everything that walks on two legs, would
have to be either in love, or possessed of an almost divine understanding. The sight of
eight million people struggling silently but desperately to merely stay alive is anything
but inspiring. For my money, at least eight million people would be much better off if all
five boroughs of New York should suddenly sink into the sea.
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In May of 1797, just five months after James Tilly Matthews was committed to Bedlam,
the Society of the Hospital in the City of New York officially admitted its first two cases of
“mania.” According to History Description and Statistics of The Bloomingdale Asylum for the
Insane, which was written and compiled in 1848 by a physician at the institute named Pliny
Earle, “This is the first notice which we have been able to discover of the treatment of Insanity in
this Institution, but as the record states that, in the same month, two cases were cured and one
died, it is evident that at least one had been previously admitted.” So, while the fine print may be
in dispute, 1797 marks the beginning of the state’s handling of what, at the time, were called
“lunatics,” “maniacs,” and “the insane.” New York at this time was still covered in lush
vegetation. There were swamps and bogs. Cobblestones negotiating with well-trampled dirt. The
New York Hospital—which was chartered in 1771, but which, on account of a massive fire and
the more massive issue of Revolutionary War, took twenty years to complete—opened in 1791
on a stretch of Broadway between Duane and what is now Worth Streets as a hospital for
“general disease.” Probably, many of those admitted prior to 1797 fit various DSM diagnoses,
but it was not until then that such categories were established, statistics recorded, and a great
proliferation of cases began.
By 1808, the hospital was admitting so many “lunatics” that “they erected a substantial
and spacious stone edifice, on the grounds of the Hospital in the city, within the same enclosure,
and but a few rods [sic] distant from the original building.” According to Earle, on its opening
day, the “Lunatic Asylum” catered to “nineteen patients [who] were removed to it from the wards
of the other building, and forty-eight [who] were admitted.” These were the wild, wild west days
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of mental health. They were characterized by experimental treatments, vacillating opinions,
shifting attitudes, and a proliferation of studies, information, and literature amassed from around
the globe. To have lost your mind in these days was, by and large, to have lost your rights. To be
ceded over by angry husbands as a ward of the state. To wake up from a drunken stupor in the
claustrophobic confines of a basement cell with no windows. To become the unwilling subject
of inquiries and examinations and therapies. You can hear in the language of these antiquated
physicians an underlying suspicion that their patients were far more capable of rehabilitation
than had ever previously been imagined, but also the frustration of not knowing exactly how to
rehabilitate them. Chief amongst the new voices in mental health, Dr. Thomas Eddy’s was a
clarion. His Hints for Introducing an Improved Mode of Treating the Insane in the Asylum was
read before the Governors of the New York Hospital on April 4
th
, 1815. In it, Eddy describes a
shift in medical practices away from “considering mania a physical or bodily disease” to “a new
system of treatment…generally denominated moral management.” The departure here wasn’t so
much somatic in nature as it was spiritual. Arguing against the prevailing corporal punishment
and restraint of “maniacs” that capitalized on fear, Eddy proposed instead a new vision of the
asylum based on European models, such as the Retreat near York in England, which encouraged
“bodily exercises, walking, riding, conversations, innocent sports, and a variety of other
amusements” including “birds, deer, rabbits, &c.” wherein the “patient should be always treated
as much like a rational being as the state of his mind will possibly allow.” Quaint. Romantic.
Etc. His was a philosophical approach that took cues from the Enlightenment and which sought
to create a space in which to respect the humanity of his patients, even if his understanding of
mental malady was necessarily limited. His impassioned speech influenced the Board of
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Governors of the New York Hospital to purchase a 55-acre tract of land some seven miles away
from the increasing bustle of the existing downtown hospital. Located high on a promontory that
“commands a prospect” of the Hudson River “which, for extent, variety and beauty, is rarely
equalled,” the Bloomingdale Asylum for the Insane was completed in 1821 and remained the
city’s preeminent mental health institution until 1888. Years before, the Dutch had coined the
upper west side of Manhattan “bloomendael” or “Vale of Flowers” for the area’s lush foliage and
fertile soil. Now, patients were encouraged to stroll outdoors amongst the grass, vegetables,
ornamental shrubbery, and full-growth trees which had been planted long ago by the Dutch
farmers who once owned the land. The facilities included pavilions for “noisy” patients, a
subdued dining area, both a men’s and women’s “lodge,” a greenhouse, a barn, and even a
rudimentary bowling alley. This was a cutting-edge facility that prided itself on catering equally
to men and women, serving (at least originally) both the wealthy and the destitute, and which
boasted about its dedication to treating them all with the sort of human dignity that antiquity
never afforded.
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Figure 17
But by the latter half of the century, the ever-expanding city had begun to creep north.
Around this time, complaints began to mount that detailed a litany of abuses and mistreatment of
patients at the asylum. Bloomingdale’s idyllic setting became an increasingly contested tract of
land, with commercial interests eager to bisect it with a new thoroughfare and downtown
residents lured north by new estates and luxurious riverside apartments. The tide shifted swiftly
and public outcry forced the asylum and its reviled patients and practices even further afield to
the suburbs of White Plains. Within months, developers took root. Columbia University
purchased the land in 1892 and promptly began constructing its new campus, which matriculated
its inaugural class in the fall of 1897.
When we say things like “lunatic,” it is because we are afraid. “Maniac.” “Madman.”
“Loony.” “Insane asylum.” When we say that someone’s gone off the deep end, it is because we
still haven’t learned to swim. To tread water. To empathize. The language we use is a moat. We
use it to guard against the underlying fact that we are all merely one unforeseen tragedy away
from a slip ourself. The scent of extramarital perfume on a well-starched collar. Lone-surviving
the flip of the family van when it discovers a patch of black ice on the way home from
Thanksgiving at the in-laws. The random, coincidental horror of a celebratory ricochet on the
New Year’s Eve. We are only ever as healthy of mind as fate decrees. I say this to friends,
sometimes, when I talk about my grandmother. “We’re all just a cuckold away from a murder
spree.” Our language is deployed like playground banter. Like an incantation. As if we are
responding to bad news by plugging up our ears with our fingers and screaming, “Shut up, shut
up, shut up!” I am talking about Katrina. I am talking about Sandy Hook. I am talking about
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Dylann Roof, Stephen Paddock, The Bataclan. We wield words like a forcefield against rats in
the attic. To make sure we’re not off our rocker. We tell people they are nuts and bananas. We tell
them they have loose screws and lost marbles and that they aren’t playing with a full deck of
cards. We whisper to one another in churches, in line at the grocery store, in a crowded elevator
—the lights are on, but nobody’s home. And even the adjectives clang with bombast. Psychotic.
Bonkers. Cuckoo. We drape even the menially disturbed in exotic syllables to keep them far from
the land of the sane, the lucid, the “rational.” Otherwise, we tiptoe into an equivocating sea of
“mental illness” as if euphemism was a panacea. As if telling the world that my Grandma Jack
went crazy is some kind of blasphemy. As if stating it plainly is a sign of disrespect instead of a
stark reality.
One particularly potent version of hell is grandmothering a small boy’s nervous bowels
through his first transcontinental flight. By which: the earliest memory I have of my Grandma
Jack is of her wadding my shit-smeared He-Man underoos into the trashcan of a mile-high
lavatory during a flight we took together, just she and I, from Los Angeles to Philadelphia, to
attend her son Jeffrey’s wedding. I was hoisted time and time again like a football in the crook of
my grandmother’s arm and marched towards the foldaway doors, a ticking time bomb ready to
explode. The in-flight airplane cabin, its sealed doors holding its passengers captive, is an
experiment in tested patience even during an uneventful flight. And for an aging woman born just
a decade or so after the invention of the jumbo jet’s crude predecessors, the aisle down which
you must hurriedly transport your finicky grandson becomes like a spotlit catwalk during
Fashion Week. Back and forth we went with each new iteration of turbulence. I do not remember
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crying or histrionics, though this very well might have been the case. But from the photographs
that survive the ceremony, it is clear that the constant and exhaustive trauma of inflight diarrhea
did not manage to deplane with us. Instead, I’m pictured amidst the innocent joy of being dressed
up for the first time without knowing exactly what I am dressed up for or how exactly to comport
myself in my dress-up clothes. I wear a child-sized navy blazer, a clip-on bowtie nudged askew
from my incessant fiddling, and my well-tanned legs jut out from a pair of pristinely white shorts
pleated dramatically to make up for the fact that they aren’t pants. Shorts are a formal concession
made for the young. Like a kid’s menu. Like sippy cups. My smile in these photographs is
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Figure 18
cheshire, full of the cheese requested by alien relatives I was meeting mostly for the first time.
Why I flew with her and not, say, my father (who I believe came on a later flight) is a mystery to
me. Except maybe to think that it was a triumphant return. A victory lap. That I was like a
winner’s trophy she could claim as her own. Proof that she had, at the very least, sewn shut the
loose threads of her mind well enough to have helped raise a young California boy so willing and
eager to perform whatever dog and pony request came his hammy way.
Otherwise, ATHAS STOMPER was akin to Pynchon’s Trystero—a symbol hidden in plain
sight that signals a secret, underground cabal responsible for keeping a precious ember burning
through these dark ages of cultural decay. In his The Crying of Lot 49, the Trystero—an emblem
of a muted post horn shrouded in mysterious origins and murky aims—connotes for Pynchon the
stubborn, muted persistence of those secret societies content to bide time until a more fertile age
arrives.

!
In the book, this particular secret society takes the form of an alternative postal system
operating under the moniker “W.A.S.T.E.,” and uses discreet public displays of the Trystero as a
means to confirm its existence to skeptics and hope-mongers alike without simultaneously
calling undue, pernicious attention to itself. We are here, suggests the Trystero, we exist, we are
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Figure 19
real, you are not alone, you are not crazy! One day soon we will be able to take this muzzle out
of our horn and blare! Which is all, I suppose, theoretical food for thought: a fictional symbol
that critiques our all-too-human eagerness to join the safety and security of the humdrum rank
and file. All fine and well until, that is, you find yourself about to cross the Williamsburg Bridge
—on foot—and see there, painted in thick black strokes upon a concrete strut undergirding the
platform, a real life Trystero out in the wild.

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Figure 20
As had, at some point, become my custom, I was out in New York exploring
neighborhoods entirely on account of their peculiar appellation (Gowanus, Bath Beach, Throgs
Neck, etc.) or their provocative subway stop nomenclature (Gun Hill Road, Marble Hill, Grand
Army Plaza), taking pictures of the scapes and scenes and structures that defined one version
(mine) of New York at the turn of the century. I found a lone dead swan somewhere near Pelham
Bay. I found a women’s restroom near Brighton Beach whose signage was missing the “w.” It
was exactly the the type of “omen” I was after. I could sense early on in my New York Stint that
I would have to leave it much sooner than later, that in some ways I had begun to overstay my
welcome the day I arrived. It was a premonition apropos of nothing, merely a sober, innate
understanding of who I could and could never be on that island. So sure was I about this
curtailed timeline that I began a hobby of archiving the city, making purposeful outings to places
I knew I would never return. Just to know them. To touch them. To bear witness. To eat slices of
pizza in the more reputable of their local pizzerias. One by one, on Friday afternoons or early
Tuesday mornings, in the random pockets throughout the week that divested themselves of
responsibility, I began to sate my wanderlust, abiding by a self-imposed rule that I had to stay no
fewer than three hours and could not, under pain of push-ups or other similar physical
punishment, retrace my steps. It was during one of these aimless expeditions that I came across
Pynchon’s muted horn. Spotting the Trystero froze me. It was like seeing a dodo in the middle of
Tribeca—as if a figment of collective imagination had materialized out of thin air. It was a
fissure. A schism. A glitch in the proverbial system that, having been exposed, now conflated
physical with metaphysics, novel fiction with tangible fact. The implications of this gave me a
mild vertigo. For a moment, I felt unsure about what simple truths I could take stock in, and
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which were imperiled. It was the inverse of being told that Santa doesn’t exist. That the Easter
Bunny is make-believe. It was such a small thing, this dumb muted horn painted on the side of
this bridge, but it was also a lynchpin—fuss with it too much and the whole structure goes to
shit. Like a case of toppled Jenga. As much as its physical existence could be explained simply
by assuming it had been painted by some erudite prankster, the kind of thing an English major
might do after a few sips of late night absinthe, I felt myself wanting to believe it was more. And
yet, what shocked me more than the symbol itself was the fact that no one else around me paid it
even an iota of attention. All the hundreds—thousands(?)—of well-choreographed bodies
moving in their well-rehearsed patterns around me, posing for photographs, jutting out into
oncoming traffic, bending over to tie a stubborn shoelace, all so casual that they might as well be
in secret cahoots, play-acting New York into existence, creating New York simply by living up to
and into its staid patterns, and yet not one of them was responsible for corroborating my awe?
None were tasked with keeping me faithful to the thin fabric of reality I had built for myself?
Surely I shouldn’t be the only one snagged by the emblem? “Stupid prank,” one of them should
have said. “Dumb English majors.” But passersby all passed me and the Trystero by without so
much as batting an eyelash. Without even asking me what in the hell I was looking at.
The meteoric rise of concrete is remarkable for its geographic scope, its epic proportions,
for its humble, messy, meandering beginnings. It is as if the entire globe emerged from copse and
quarry at more or less the same time, toil-weary and impatient for the onslaught of modernity. I
think always of a fourth little pig inordinately secure in modern box of reinforced concrete with a
Cy Twombly hung on the wall, scoffing indignantly at the feeble dwellings of his three brethren
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all hopelessly stuck in the past. Never in such a short span has our physical world been so
dramatically altered by one (albeit composite) material. Like flight, like electricity, like puberty
—concrete welcomed our culture to a great leap forward. While its history is punctuated by the
prominent figures of 20
th
-century architecture, concrete is as much a the result of artisanal, one-
off trial and error as it is a collective skyscraping ambition. We live today in the staggering
denouement of Walter Gropius, Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Oscar Niemeyer, our most
recent buildings smoothing and and refining and amplifying through computers the rough edges
of their first forays and innovations. But there are countless others who set the stage long before
these foundations were laid. Men like Auguste Perret insinuated into Parisian cities during the
19-teens the concrete apartments and garages which contrasted the quarried stone and red brick
of the past. Even clad in all those decorative tiles, Perret’s first notable Parisian building at 25 bis
rue Franklin still remains after more than a century a cornerstone of reinforced concrete,
indebted in large part to the bureau d’études of François Hennebique, professional offices
dedicated solely to translating into this new material the blueprints of architects from across
Europe. Before this, 19
th
-century tinkerers and entrepreneurs like Wayss & Freytag in Germany,
Joseph Lambot in France, William Wilkinson in England, and Joseph Monier, an unceremonious
French garden designer, each laid claim to patents for introducing iron, steel, and other metals
into concrete mixtures. Theirs were efforts to improve and reinforce what was then commonly
called béton, which, like bitumen, comes from the Old French betum, a “mass of rubbish in the
ground.” Imagine, then, even further back, when whole continents dotted with farmers and fence
builders, masons and bricklayers, each in his own way developing this ground-borne “rubbish”
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into something functional, each recipe improving upon the next, word of mouth spreading the
techniques of DIY yeomans like a cure to provincialism. I try, sometimes, to imagine the world
these early pioneers of concrete inhabited. Just before the uppercut of the Industrial Age
connected with the yawning jaw of mankind. I try, sometimes, to imagine this Earth without
concrete. Pulsing. Alive. Naked. Rocks and soil and the trampled paths that ran over them.
When, for instance, I twist my ankle hiking. When, for instance, I trudge across sand from
boardwalk to beach towel. Those moments camping when a tire spins fruitlessly deeper into a
puddle of mud. Our curbs, our driveways, our gutters, and especially our sidewalks—these are
the nuts and bolts of modern life, the prodigious (infra)structures by which we have so
thoroughly tamed and capitulated our earth. We sleep today in the wildest dreams of the Stone
Age, at the apotheosis of adobe and mud, complaining about cell service and internet speeds
even while our ancestors would marvel that our shit is carried in concrete pipes ten feet wide far
out to sea with a single flush.
Brooklyn, as I had suspected, had meanwhile begun to emulate the vulgarity of its more
famous neighboring borough across the river. This was not so much a matter of skyline as it was
temperament. Brooklyn had begun to strut like that teenage girl finally aware of her hips. She
was all dressed up in fresh duds and bravado. The shift was felt most keenly in the details—an
influx of outdoor patios, sommeliers, ATMs. The advertisements posted near the subway stairs
were no longer months past pertinence as they had been during my stint. The dog shit was
preempted by dispensers full of small plastic baggies. Medians had been replanted and wafted
with the civil war smell of fresh manure versus hydrangea. Thick pools of asphalt nullified the
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crippling power of former potholes. And beneath Chris’s spacious apartment was a motorcycle
store that specialized in coffee sourced in the foothills of some Guatemalan town whose pickers
could not at all have afforded the (roasted) fruits of their labor. Still, though, with the lights off
and my eyes closed, I could recline on the hardwood floor and listen to the city come alive in the
dusk as only New York can. One theory is that every city has its sound. No matter the era, no
matter the epoch, it persists like a signature. New York is/was a philharmonic catcall. A slurred
symphony of grinding gears and doomsday fanatics. A grand slam of accents and accidents. A
lisp-heavy chorus of fuck yous to drown out the chainsaws in the night. It was a comfort as cozy
as a baby’s blanket.
I woke up the next day earlier than I planned, my body still meandering its way through
the rigors of jet lag. Too, though, I could sense a gentle excitement take hold of me. The day was
mine to live in any manner I wished. I had no obligations. I shouldered no expectations. And
though my instinct in open-ended situations was always to plot out a loose framework that would
set me on a productive—or, at the very least, interesting—trajectory, I fought hard to preserve an
unstructured cannonball leap-before-you-look-type approach. I was in the mood for governable
trouble. I wanted to leave the door open for pugilism, French kissing, perhaps a seance to raise
the dead. The paths I took through the streets were jagged and nonsensical, inspired for some
blocks by lust for trio of svelte, post-workout buttocks, hinging at other times on the route taken
by a stray-ish-looking terrier. I let myself follow minor mysteries until they solved themselves or
were replaced by new ones with more steam. By midmorning I found myself in DUMBO,
thumbing idly through a selection of photography monographs released by the Aperture imprint
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that I could not afford, browsing my way through a new (to me) bookstore that catered equally to
young professionals and their young. The vast majority of offerings were of the coffee table
variety, books with large photographic spreads on tiny houses, on wood stacking practices native
to Norway, on many-thousand-mile motorcycle trips made by movie stars through South
America, on the traditional tattoos of mid-century U.S.S.R. I ate some meagre breakfast—a
bagel? a muffin? I do not now recall—mostly for the scenery outside the bookstore café: three
portly men draped in vests the shade of neon orange that signaled some variety of Official City
Business were employed in the work of bringing an antiquated street corner up to code. One
manned a jackhammer while the other two went about the business of inlaying into soft concrete
that sheet of raised, yellow, quarter-sized dots that signals to those with a disability that they are
about to leave behind the safety of the sidewalk for the genuine danger of a New York City
street.
There were many years, of course, where, like concrete itself, sidewalks did not exist.
Whole ages and epochs when the world at large offered no distinction between passage by foot,
hoof, or wheel. Stiff-legged men trudging across plant-less streaks of earth where the grass and
bramble had been trampled into submission. Stone and rock scrambled together along routes
made popular by pilgrimage and pillage and plunder. I think of the filth. I imagine the bunions,
the fractured metatarsals, the hobbled gaits. The habitual need to step aside as a procession of
royal chariots raced past or a team of oxen plowed by. These were precarious millennia which
saw fit to commingle man and beast and (eventually) beast-driven vehicles in rudimentary
trenches strewn heavily with precarious boulders and piles of shit and puddles of piss, both
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human and otherwise. Such that when first they appeared, some 4,000 years ago in the
commercial trading kârum of Kültepe in what is today central Turkey, sidewalks were certainly a
revelation. One can imagine the palm-to-head glee of the shuffling crowds as they made their
way about the bustling marketplace for the first time in human history on raised walkways which
clearly demarcated where they could stroll sewage-less and trample-free. Of a sudden, a public
space was born whose purpose was to prioritize the bipedal instinct which most fundamentally
set man apart from beast. Of a sudden appeared thin strips of raised respite amidst endless muck
and mire. And when they appeared, these primitive sidewalks offered a toehold for man’s
journey away from chaos, and present early evidence of a trajectory towards order and reason.
But today, the half-hearted tenderness we might sporadically feel for sidewalks lasts only
as long as we are inconvenienced by their lack. It is not lost on me that an obsession with
something as commonplace as a slab of New York City sidewalk—even one bearing an
intriguing, abracadabra-esque phrase—is, on the face of it, a peculiar obsession to harbor. There
are, by my estimation, close to four million such 5x5 foot cement slabs which comprise the
approximately 12,400 miles of New York City sidewalk that outline either side of its
approximately 6,200 miles of streets, boulevards, avenues, ways, places, and alleys which snake
their way through all 304.6 congested square miles of its five boroughs. That is enough concrete
for four complete transcontinental journeys. Or two fully furnished Great Walls of China. Etc.
Which means that even a casually observant New York City pedestrian will, during the course of
any given New York City day, encounter many similar instances of New York City sidewalk
engraved with an exhaustive variety of words, symbols, and stick-figure drawings that run the
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gamut from smut to smiling sun, and which record for posterity the chirographic whims made by
the bolder constituents of the New York City populace. The sheer abundance of sidewalk, then,
engraved or otherwise, disappears it from our consciousness. Like gravity, or the protruding tip
of our nose which our young eyes quickly learn to blot from our field of vision as they mature
and grow accustomed to its clumsy presence. Sidewalk, like electricity, like running water, like
two-ply toilet paper, articulates its presence best through its absence. When it has run out or gone
missing. When, for instance, we must cross the street because a certain construction site has
closed the sidewalk in front of us. Or those stretches of rural road or busy highway that offer the
stranded motorist only a slim, harrowing rumble strip of safe passage to the nearest gas station or
callbox. It is only then, and only fleetingly at that, when we are denied the much-taken-for-
granted benefit of sidewalk that we remember the integral role it plays in preserving our simple
impulse to walk upright in a world ever more deferent to planes, trains, and automobiles. In the
city, such appreciation fades again into the homeostatic obscurity that underscores all public
works, little more than a scuffed runway for our pointed heels and a repository for flavorless
gum. I should say, too, that I once ranked amongst the overwhelming majority of those wholly
uninterested in sidewalk. Besides that summer early in my adolescence when the sidewalk in my
hometown was altered to include studded concrete tiles whose bumps effectively prohibited
skateboarding in its upscaling business district, I cannot remember even once having a passing
thought that concerned sidewalk. Or paving of any kind for that matter. By and large, sidewalk
was for me as it is for so many others: far more right than privilege. An automatic function of
times post-Roman. Occasionally, perhaps, a display for minor experiments in colored chalk.
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ATHAS STOMPER was not a covert postal system. ATHAS STOMPER was not responsible for
chemtrails. ATHAS STOMPER did not constitute the quote unquote deep state. I was sure of it.
ATHAS STOMPER was not a code name for the faking of our moon landing. ATHAS STOMPER did
not shoot Martin Luther King, Jr. ATHAS STOMPER did not shoot John F. Kennedy. ATHAS
STOMPER did not shoot Robert Kennedy. ATHAS STOMPER did not author 9/11 as an inside job.
ATHAS STOMPER did not believe that the Earth was flat. ATHAS STOMPER never went to Heaven’s
Gate. ATHAS STOMPER never went to the Bermuda Triangle. ATHAS STOMPER was not a Thetan.
ATHAS STOMPER did not kidnap the Lindbergh baby. Etc.

Antonio Sant’Elia never got to see his Città Nuova built because he was killed on
October 10, 1916 at the promising age of twenty-eight while fighting as a staunch and loyal
Italian nationalist against Austro-Hungarian soldiers during the Eighth Battle of the Isonzo, a
protracted series of skirmishes and aggressions that spanned over two years and twelve battles in
all, each bleeding almost imperceptibly into the next, for the right to control the Isonzo River
which, during those years and since, habitually flooded its banks.
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Figure 21
The carnage of the collective Battles of the Isonzo was devastating, and proved responsible for
more than half of the Italian casualties suffered during the entirety of World War I. Between the
two belligerent factions, a total of 300,000 Italians and 200,000 Austro-Hungarians were
slaughtered. Sant’Elia was buried in a cemetery set aside for his Arezzo Brigade, a cemetery
which, only one year prior, he had been commissioned to design.
The Human Condition also requires verbs like slaughter and suffer. Nouns like carnage
and casualties. The often misunderstood concept of irony, situational and otherwise.
I try to make a list from memory of all the things I know about my Grandma Jack. I know
she was born in April. The 9
th
. Three days after me. Somewhere just past World War I. I know
she was black. Had two sisters, Lois and Elaine. And was raised in New Jersey. I think. Or?
I do not get very far in my list. I quickly realize just how little I know about her, the
woman who spent so much of her life devoted to me. So I make instead a list of the things I do
not know about Grandma Jack—all the things I do not know, but should. This list is much longer.
It leads to questions like: What year, exactly, was she born in? And in what city? In what
hospital? Who was responsible for naming her Jacqueline, and why did they do it? Was it her
mother? Was it her father? And what were their names? What did she called her parents when
she didn’t call them “mother” and “father”? Did she have any nicknames for them? And what
were their nicknames for her? What were her first words? To whom did she speak her first
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words? And how did her parents make a living? How did they provide for her? What type of
house did they live in? One-story? Two? An apartment? A duplex? What was the address? Were
her parents black? Rather, were both of her parents black? Or was one of her parents black and
one of her parents white, like mine? Or were both of her parents black but also something else?
Was this the reason that her skin was not as dark as people would imagine when I told them she
was black? When I told them that my Grandma Jack was black? Were her parents ever heckled
as niggers and, if so, how many times, and by whom? What did they do about it, if anything?
Were her parents at any point slaves? As children, maybe? Do I have that chronology wrong?
How long did she have to wait for her two younger sisters, Lois and Elaine, to show up? Or was
she actually younger than Lois but older than Elaine? Or younger than Elaine but older than
Lois? Was my grandmother or any of her sisters ever heckled as a nigger and, if so, how many
times, and by whom, and how did it feel? Did they do anything about it? Did her parents do
anything about it? What sorts of games did she play with her sisters? What was the quality of her
family life? At some point, her Aunt Lily became the primary caretaker for my grandmother and
her sisters, but why? Somehow I know this, but I do not know why? Did her parents die? And, if
so, how? And, if not, was there some other tragedy? Alcohol? Jail? Did she miss her mother? Did
she miss her father? Did she think about them often? And what was the name of the first boy that
she kissed? And how old was she when she kissed him? And how did it feel? And what was the
name of the first boy she fucked? And how old was she when she fucked him? And how did it
feel? Unless she kissed a girl first, as unlikely as this may seem? Unless she fucked a girl first, as
unlikely as this may seem? I would like to be fair, here. I would like not to assume. Was she ever
molested and, if so, when, and by whom, and how did this make her feel, and had she ever told
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anyone? What did she dream of becoming when she was a child? What did she dreamed of
becoming as a teenager? What did she regret never becoming as an adult? The name of the pool
where she was a lifeguard? If she thought it was silly that the pool at which she was a lifeguard
was segregated for use by coloreds only? Unless the pool at which she was a lifeguard maybe
was split in half? Unless she was allowed to save only the lives of people whose skin resembled
hers? And had she ever been called upon to save someone’s life? And, if she was called upon to
save someone’s life, had she saved it? And how did this change her? What kind of grades did she
get? How much pride did getting those grades give her? Whether or not she planned from a
young age to use those grades to get into college? Whether or not college was even something
she thought she could achieve? Thought she could afford? And what college did she go to? What
kind of barriers were there? Racism? Sexism? Other -isms of which I’m ignorant? And when did
she enroll at Rutgers to get her Master’s in Education degree? And did she actually enroll at
Rutgers to get her Master’s in Education degree? Or was this just a story I made up on account of
the Rutgers sweatshirt she always wore? On account of the Rutgers sweatshirt my father always
wore, too? On account of my grandmother being a school teacher, or at least a substitute school
teacher? What was her first job? Did she quit or was she fired? Why? What happened? What role
did God play in her life and if that role was steady and fixed or if it waxed and waned? How
often she went to church as a child? How often she went to church as a teenager? How often she
went to church even when she didn’t want to go to church? If she was a regular at confession?
And, if she was a regular at confession, what sorts of things did she confess? What was she
ashamed of? What was she afraid of? How did she meet my grandfather? And were there men
before my grandfather? Was my grandfather her first love? How old was she when she met my
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grandfather? What were the circumstances of her first date with my grandfather? And did she
actually love my grandfather and, if so, for how long? If she knew when she met my grandfather
that he would love her as violently as he did? If she knew this but decided to love him anyway?
If people that loved her told her not to love my grandfather? If people that loved her told her not
to marry my grandfather? And, if the people that loved her had told her these things, why did she
do it anyway? What was it about my grandfather that she could not resist? How long did they
wait before trying to make her a mother? And how did she feel about being a mother? Before she
was a mother? After she became a mother? How did she feel about being the mother of twins?
Was being the mother of twins any different, did she think, than being just a mother of one baby
at a time? What had being a mother done to her body? If, while she was pregnant, she was
scared? If, while she was pregnant, she was also full of purpose? Or if, while she was pregnant,
she was full of horror? Did she drink while she was pregnant? Did she smoke while she was
pregnant? And when, anyway, did she start smoking? Drinking? And why? Had she ever tried to
quit smoking? Drinking? And why? How often my grandfather hit her, if indeed he hit her in the
first place? And if he hit her, when he hit her if she felt inside like she deserved it or like she
deserved better? If she ever hit back? If she ever cheated on my grandfather? Or if she ever
suspected he was cheating on her? If they ever stayed up late into the night talking about
cheating on one another? If, when they spoke to one another late at night about cheating on one
another, they made a big deal about staying quiet so they wouldn’t wake up their children—my
father, my uncles? If sometimes she felt like screaming? If there was ever a time when she felt
alone in her marriage? If there was ever a time when she felt trapped by her marriage? If there
was ever a time when she wished she hadn’t married, or at least wish that she had married
!169
someone different? What sports did she like? To watch? To play? Did she even like sports in the
first place? Or did she just pretend to like sports to appease all the people in her life that truly did
like sports? What was her favorite color? Number? Movie? Television show? Food? What was
her favorite dessert? Her favorite word? Book? What music did she like? What instrument did
she learn to play first? Who taught her how to play it? Had she ever performed in front of an
audience? And, if she had, what song did she perform? And what instrument was it that she was
playing? Did she stop playing music because she became a mother? Because being a mother took
so much time and energy that she didn’t have the verve to play anymore? If she ever took illicit
drugs and, if so, how often and to what effect? If she ever called anyone a nigger and, if so, why,
and how did it make her feel? If she masturbated? And, if she masturbated, when had she
started? And, if she masturbated, was she ashamed of doing it? And when, if so, had she
stopped? Had she stopped? When was the last time she kissed a man? When was the last time a
man gave her an orgasm? Had a man ever given her an orgasm? Had anyone ever talked to her
about sex when she was growing up? When, exactly, was she diagnosed with lupus and how did
this diagnosis make her feel? Physically? Emotionally? Psychologically? What drove her to
divorce her husband—my grandfather—and if she ever regretted doing it, or regretted not doing
it earlier? Or had he been the engine behind the subject of divorce? When and how she met the
man I know only as “Joey?” If she loved Joey and, if so, why, and for how long? What type of
things did she do with Joey, and were these things different than the things she did with my
grandfather? Did Joey ever hurt her and, if so, how—physically, emotionally, psychologically?
And why did things with Joey end? Was she proud of her children and, if so, which child in
particular and why? Was she ever ashamed at some aspect of her parenting and, if so, what?
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When was she diagnosed with schizophrenia? Before this diagnosis, was she aware that her mind
was prone to this type of crazy? What is the earliest memory she has of hearing voices talk to
her? Was there an incident in particular that precipitated these voices starting? What, other than
voices, characterized her psychotic experiences? Did she see things that others did not see? Did
she feel things that others did not feel? What about the day she was finally relieved of her
teaching duties at East Orange High School does she remember? What about the day my father
married my mother does she remember? Was she embarrassed that my father was marrying into a
white family? How did she feel about becoming my grandmother, and what does she remember
about the first time she got to hold me? Did the feeling she had when she held me for the first
time do anything to calm the voices raging in her head? Did the feeling she had when she held
me during my baptism do anything to calm the voices raging in her head? When she moved to
California, ostensibly to take care of me, did she ever fear that she might do something bad, that
she might harm me in some manner, without being totally conscious or aware of what she was
doing? Or did the love she felt for me preclude any concerns that might have plagued her
conscience? What, if anything, did she regret?
!171

To make my ends meet, I found gainful part-time employment working just off of Union
Square on the windowless sixth floor of an aggressively nondescript building as an “assistant” in
the office of Barbra Braun and Associates. My primary tasks included, but were not limited to,
screening Ms. Braun’s electronic mail, editing Ms. Braun’s electronic mail responses, and
composing Ms. Braun’s electronic mail responses in the (rather common) instance that she
couldn’t be bothered to compose a response herself. I was hired, I think, because I was good at
minding my own business. That, and I was proficient with the sort of basic computer
applications (Word, Outlook, Powerpoint) that Ms. Braun tacitly refused to learn, much less
master. She was the type of boss who took overt pride in being a stick in the mud. It conferred on
her a stubborn charm that implied she had been around the block more times than we
whippersnappers could count, kiddo. She corresponded primarily with an IBM Selectric
Typewriter. She insisted upon FM radio background music, commercials and all. And she saw no
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Figure 22
compelling reason to swap her cassette tape answering machine for a digital analog when it still
functioned without flaw. I took well to the environment, mostly because, like the Associates she
oversaw, I could very easily and without penalty exaggerate and prolong the time it took me to
complete my menial tasks without Ms. Braun so much as noticing, and could thereby indulge in
my own projects so far as it looked outwardly like I was engaged in hers. Which, as best I could
tell, Ms. Braun and her Associates were in the business of managing a small stable of middling
writers, artists, anthropologists, astronomers, philosophers, historians, scientists, intellectuals,
and other hardscrabble humanists whose collective third-party responsibility was to edit,
factcheck, amend, redact, and otherwise correct entries, articles, and other copy written in-house
at information aggregators across the globe. Our clients were often engaged in projects as
nondescript as we were—nautical encyclopedias, tractor-trailer instruction manuals, primary
school art history pamphlets, etc.—and hired us only in instances whereby their own teams had
grown too gangly and lackadaisical to be trusted with their own edits. To people who had a hard
time understanding exactly what business we were in, Ms. Braun usually said, “We give sight to
the blindspot.” She meant, I think, those obvious errors to which every author is inherently blind,
utterly incapable of seeing the simple mistake others can spot in a single pass as a result of
critical distance.
I spent most of my hours at Barbara Braun and Associates annoyed at the thinness of my
dress socks. During winter especially, my feet retained the permanent chill gifted by an errant
step placed clumsily into the gutter slush of dirty snow. It was still dark when I arrived at the
office, and already dark by the time I left. Such was the plight of northern latitude employment.
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The Associates ate in silence in the lunch room, or otherwise traveled in small coteries to
overpriced faux-Mexican establishments around the corner. They were the type of people who
never thought twice about splurging on avocado or guacamole. I figured that staying quiet and
keeping to myself was the best course of action. No one, I posited, got fired for doing his job. It
was always the extracurriculars that lead to complication. My saving grace usually came in the
form of a task-less post-lunch period during which I pretended to be hard at work on assignments
I had already breezed through during the morning hours. I could keep one viable email window
open just in case, the cursor blinking inquisitively, while simultaneously delving by hand into my
“real” work which had, by that point, become an obsession. A compulsion. A mandate. For
weeks, months(?), I poured myself into a long and winding narrative that figured ATHAS
STOMPER as the preteen hero/villain of a science-fiction-ish plot concerned with the total
systematic removal of pain from an alternate and matte-flat version of our world. This story
didn’t involve futuristic magic or technological wizardry, but focussed rather on the geographic
isolation of the joyful, and the strategic “retirement” of “harmers.” Pain could be abolished,
argued ATHAS STOMPER, if those in power were willing to make just a few tough choices. But she
(this version of ATHAS STOMPER felt feminine) never fully took to the text, and followed cues
from so many other shit ideas I had inherited from high school book lists and movie theater
disasters that, some many chapters in, I had begun a steady treadmill of crumple and toss. Not to
be discouraged, I retreated to a reprisal of the Norse ATHAS who always swam around my mind,
fleshing out the particular shape of his exile, which I decided was a result—I hoped unexpectedly
—of a homophobia so entrenched in the STOMPER culture that, regardless of his numerous and
unequivocally fierce contributions to the good and betterment of his land-grabbing people, his
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illicit affairs with same-sex “savages” required ATHAS to be banished to a cave in a remote and
inaccessible locale. This ATHAS STOMPER took as his model Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens, the
vegetarian curmudgeon who recoils from the excess of a rotten society, and withdrew in disgust
and with animosity for his shortsighted compatriots. This was a sort of survival story, with bear
attacks and frostbites, but focused far more on the shattered psyche of the fallen hero on account
of how boring it was to talk about hunting food and building fires. Here again, though, the work
stalled. Flailed. Lost the momentum as soon as the novelty of a gay Viking wore off (and it wore
off rather quickly). ATHAS STOMPER could only bite hard into a native’s tallow-covered shoulder
blade or ash-smeared clavicle so many times before it became egregiously pornographic, before
it was simply pandering to an audience of me. What I began to realize, many recycling bins later,
was that while ATHAS STOMPER sounded like a character worthy of something book-length, it
may actually have sounded too much like a character worthy of something book-length for me to
pull this book-length thing off. If I was trying to make art or Art or something that at least passed
as something in the vicinity of art or Art—or even “Art”—ATHAS STOMPER rang as comic sans as
Superman, as Fantasyland as Captain Hook.
Wrote the young Hunter S. Thompson, one floor above me, shortly before being hired on
as a lowly copy boy at Time Magazine: “Merely to read a New York paper is to wallow in a bog
of filth and despair, disaster and rape, and never-ending tales of human viciousness.”
When, very near the end of my New York Stint, I read in the newspaper that Tareyton
Williams had, after “urinating in a bottle,” “apparently traded [a large stuffed] gorilla for two
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black and yellow power saws that had been left unattended “ I read it as a transaction. I saw in
my mind’s eye this Tareyton Williams calmly hand his large stuffed gorilla over to the
“contractors working on the public address system” in exchange for the yellow power saws. This
is the kind of city I believed I was living in. The kind where such surreal transactions were du
jour. A stranger bartering one stuffed gorilla for two deadly power tools. On a subway platform.
At 3:30 in the morning. This, on first glance, seemed plausible. All in a day’s work. In any case,
as it turned out, Taretyon Williams didn’t trade his stuffed gorilla for two black and yellow
power saws so much as he swapped one for the others of his own accord. Without asking. What’s
more, the saws were not of the chain- variety, and even “power” suggested something slightly
more demonic than the truth. It was confusing given the initial account to understand how
anyone, let alone a 4-foot-11 sexagenarian postal employee, could have survived an attack made
with two throttled chainsaws without being decapitated or, at the very least, dismembered. But,
as it turned out, the saws were of the Sawzall®variety, the kind with a flimsy four-inch
reciprocating blade. Or sometimes smaller. Sure, yes, incredibly dangerous, but, still, and,
though. The point, I think, was lost somewhere in a much earlier paragraph. The City of the
Future, I realized, wasn’t so unique in its propensity to harbor stuffed gorillas or unattended
reciprocating saws. It was unique in its response. Or, rather, lack there of. “The motor kept going
on and he was trying to cut through me,” Mr. Steinberg said. The subway workers, he added,
“watched from the sidelines and did nothing at first to help.”

I became more belligerent with my iterations of ATHAS STOMPER. I wrote long diatribes in
which ATHAS STOMPER was heir apparent to the Loma Prieta earthquake. In which ATHAS
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STOMPER tore a liquified seam through equatorial lands that swallowed entire civilizations lump
sum, pyramids and all, god rest ye merry gentlemen. Otherwise ATHAS STOMPER was that 27-
year-old black man choked to death on a Staten Island street corner by a cadre of heavily-armed
police officers for resisting an arrest that stemmed from purportedly hocking loose cigarettes. Or,
conversely, ATHAS STOMPER was the lifeless carcass of a dead cop paraded by angry protestors
through the streets of a not-so-distant and fully-autonomous Seattle. ATHAS STOMPER rose to
power in an east African province so hungry for leadership that his desperate proponents
followed his fervor into an abyss of female circumcision, institutionalized rape, and cartel-ish
dictatorship. And the ATHAS STOMPER bridge collapsed in broad daylight over the Minnesotan
section of the Mississippi sending more than a dozen plummeting to their death, some trapped
for many minutes in submerging trucks and sedans without the strength or ability to remove their
seatbelts or kick through the windshield to safety. Some said that the ATHAS STOMPER effect
contributed directly to the increased instances of infant mortality. And Japanese citizens were
interned at ATHAS STOMPER, simply out of fear, as a result of xenophobic hysteria. Over the next
nineteen hours, ATHAS STOMPER tied the woman to her bed with computer cables and taped her
mouth closed, raped and sodomized her repeatedly, burned her with hot water and bleach, slit her
eyelids with scissors, and force-fed her an overdose of ibuprofen or a similar pain reliever. ATHAS
STOMPER became a solitary wanderer, in the marshes near the mouth of the river Nile, not at that
season when its waters bring joy and refreshment, but at its lowest ebb, when the heat is most
oppressive, and the muddy and stagnant pools diffuse a putrid and suffocating stench. Or,
decreed ATHAS STOMPER: I will sell the land into the hands of evildoers. I will bring desolation
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upon the land and everything in it, by the hand of foreigners. I am ATHAS STOMPER. I have
spoken.
To this day, preserved within the concrete that borders the western side of the first house I
grew up in at 811 Anita Street in Redondo Beach, California are the diminutive handprints my
sister and I put there in August of 1984, when I was but a year old. These are flanked by our
names, mine a version of my sobriquet that is misspelled (“Binki”) as a result of either my
sister’s slapdash substitution of “i” for “y,” or the fact that we had yet as a family to collectively
decide on its definitive spelling (“Binky”).

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Figure 23
Words do a poor job of describing the vertigo one feels whilst looking at the imprint of
his toddler hands preserved in the concrete surrounding his first childhood home some thirty-
something years hence. It is like finding trilobitic evidence of your own ancient history. The
yawn of interceding years easily collapsed by kneeling down and seeing how poorly your adult
phalanges fit within the mold. It is physical evidence not just of your maturation, but of a
moment in time where possibilities were still endless. When the mistakes were yet to be made,
the catastrophes still wholly avoidable. In the act of inscription alone, there is an exuberance—a
celebration of simply existing in the first place. If a headstone is a testament, I suppose, the
scribbling we immortalize in the wet cement of our youth is a certificate of birth. A writ of
passage. Of course, I don’t remember placing my hands in the wet concrete at 811 Anita. I was
too young to form any memories of it. When I ask my sister about that day, she says that “it
wasn’t a big, planned-out thing.” That
we were just getting the concrete done on the side of the house. It was just brown dirt
before, and we thought it would be cool if we put our handprints in it. I don’t know what
Mom said about it. I think she was cool with it. Or maybe she was at work? I remember
the wood dowel that separated the concrete pouring. For some reasons I feel like it was
actually the guy doing the concrete—it was his idea. Don’t know if that’s true or not, but
it’s kinda that way in my memory.
This is a conversation we have late at night. The news tells me there are yet more mass
graves being dug, this time in the parking lot of what used to be an auto parts factory, and I can’t
sleep and so find myself texting my sister about our youthful adventures in wet cement. We
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deliberate for a while but can never fully decide if our brother’s hands are there, too? (They
aren’t. I have gone back now to check.) Or if he had already moved out of the house to live with
his father who is also her father but not my father. (He had.) I ask her if she wrote our names
with a stick? “I think we wrote our names with our fingers,” she says. “I like to think of it as
semi-spontaneous. And it kind of had to be fast before it set. I think of those handprints like a
picture. Like a snapshot. Don’t you?”
My mother and grandmother were not related by blood but by Alfreds. The one my
grandmother married (Alfred Brown II) helped create the one my mother married (Alfred Brown
III) who, in turn, helped create the one (me) they were both engaged in raising. Both of their
Alfreds, it seems, were cut from the same charming, well-mustachioed, sport-enthusiastic cloth.
These were Alfreds that I have heard people describe as “suave.” They danced to Latin-inspired
music and gregariously placed orders for the entire table whenever possible. The II quit Cornell
to fight in a war for a country that was still, at that time, remiss to let people of his complexion
cast a vote. The III was a linebacker, a catcher, the type of man that made his way through law
school by bribing women to write his essays with nights out on the town. Both my Grandma Jack
and my mother should, I think, be excused for expecting the bark of puppy love to follow
through with more bite. Too, though: neither would ever admit to regretting their Alfreds. Such
was the intensity of their pride that neither woman, my mother nor my Grandma Jack, would
categorize their failed love as a mistake. My mother’s preferred lullaby was “Que Sera, Sera”.
Jack’s: “Hush Little Baby”. I think of them, sometimes, comparing their Alfreds over morning
coffee. Taking notes on when and where their Alfreds spoiled, rotted. And while neither of the
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Alfreds they married proved capable of l(i/o)ving up to their modest, naive expectations, these
women joined forces to raise a IV (me) that they hoped just might. I tell my mother, from time to
time, that this is clearly too many Alfreds. That there shouldn’t be any confusion as to why
meltdown was so prevalent in our nuclear family. Alfreds are all pomp and no circumstance, I
tell her. “We are like a tired, morning-after swim through a Fifth of July ocean,” I say “polluted
with the false promise of last night’s barge-flung pyrotechnics.”
In 2002, an artist and Senior Lecturer in Digital Media at the University of West England
in Bristol named Rod Dickinson (re)constructed an Air Loom in real life modeled after the
diagram James Tilly Matthews drew for Illustrations of Madness. The device was made of oak,
brass, and leather, and when it was exhibited, first in 2002 at The Laing Art Gallery in
Newcastle, then in 2006 at the Prinzhorn Institute in Heidelberg, the Air Loom filled the entirety
of the room. At 10 meters x 10 meters x 6 meters in size, viewers were dwarfed by what looked
like a gigantic showpiece of exotic steampunk furniture. Out from a massive wooden chest-like
contraption slink twelve elephantine leather tubes, each connecting the main structure to smaller
hooped barrels ostensibly filled with the “vapours” that Matthews suggested were at the root of
his torment. Art critics visiting the Air Loom were uniform in suggesting that it is a timely
artwork, and requires viewers to contemplate how far (or not) we’ve come with regards to
surveillance states and trampled rights since Matthews’ politically-influenced paranoia got the
better of him. In statements made by Dickinson himself, he confirms that his artworks explore
“feedback systems” in our contemporary culture and “utilise methods of reconstruction, and re-
staging, focusing on historical moments, objects or events that have clear and instructive
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parallels with the present.” Quaint. Romantic. Etc. I wonder, though, what kind of feedback there
is in the fact that his imposing Air Loom was last exhibited in 2016 at the Bethlem Museum of
the Mind—in the very halls of the former Bedlam that once played host to Matthews, in the very
location that 200 years prior the Air Loom diagrams were first drafted? This is life imitating art
imitating life. Seeing the colossal instrument occupy that space is eerie. Uncanny. It is a figment
materialized. Belated proof that the imaginary contraption for which Matthews was both
condemned and examined existed after all, albeit in a distant future. It is proof that no matter
how insane our thoughts may seem at the time, they are always rooted in world capable of
bringing them to life.

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Figure 24
Because mine was a “single” mother with two mortgages she inherited from two failed
marriages, she found herself working well into the evening for a procession of tech companies
that enunciated their clout with mysterious three-initial monikers. IBM. DEC. JDE. They sold
international business machines and called themselves digital equipment corporations. Even now,
I only superficially comprehend what, exactly, these companies do (or, did). As a child, I
imagined my mother in a lab coat and goggles, fine-tuning the tension on rods and knobs that
controlled dream machines and weather makers. Mostly, though, I played solitaire and Microsoft
Ski on large, expensive computers in her office that she and her coworkers called “workstations.”
This was during weekends when she had to log extra hours of sales rep preparation and I was sat
Indian-style in an expensive office chair that earned its price tag in swivels and lumbar support.
Usually, though, I was not privy to the office life my mother toiled away at. Instead, after school
and otherwise, I was the sole charge of my Grandma Jack. The deal struck was such that, after
the divorce, she came to live for a highly reduced rate in the studio apartment my mother built
for her over the garage in exchange for innumerable hours of free childcare. At the time, I was
unaware that the care was also symbiotic. Palliative. Therapeutic. Fraught.
The Greeks referred to the type of love I shared with my Grandma Jack as storge. It is
distinguished from other concepts of love, like philia and eros and agape, in that it harbors an
element of obligation. Unlike those other varieties, storge describes the type of love that requires
you to give up your bed when family visits from out of town. It is the type of love that forces you
to sit through the sixth retelling of a dinner table oration regarding a botched brake job
performed years prior by a mechanic most notable for his lack of ring digit. Storge is the love we
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suffer through with tacit pride. Like an aunt’s sloppy, wet kiss and the lipstick it leaves behind.
Most days my Grandma Jack was a taskmaster. She went from demanding the attention of
classrooms full of New Jersey high school students to demanding the attention of just one small,
shell-shocked boy. It was as though the task she now mastered had become hyper-focused, and it
allotted her the vigilant, watchful eye of a beefeater. Which is not to say that she went overboard.
Which is not to say that her supervision was tyrannical. Too, though: this was a woman who was
fluent in mild corpor(a/ea)l punishments. Whose backhand was well-versed in jawlines and, as
she referred to them, “derrières.” She loomed well above her compact stature via exacting stares
and excoriating moments of shrill. She reigned stoically with a charring Marlboro Light in lieu of
scepter.
Nowadays when I ask my parents what they were thinking when they let a crazy person
raise their child, they both shrug it off. “She was medicated,” says my mother. “You turned out
just fine, didn’t you?” says my father.
It is point well-taken.
And yet.
When I try to remember hints of my grandmother’s insanity, I cannot. I try, but am
unable. To locate, for instance, a moment, perhaps, when this man—“The man… The man…”—
and his radio waves interjected an alternate reality into my bath time or Jimmy Dean sausage
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biscuit. An instance of warbled reality. A splintering. But whatever voices Jack was hearing in
her New Jersey classroom did not follow her outwardly to California. At least, not that we could
tell. The DSM outlines a schedule upon which to plot the schizophrenic at any given moment
throughout the life of the disorder:
• First episode, currently in acute episode
• First episode, currently in partial remission
• First episode, currently in full remission
• Multiple episodes, currently in acute episode
• Multiple episodes, currently in partial remission
• Multiple episodes, currently in full remission
• Continuous
• Unspecified
You can read this almost like you might a tank of gas or a Smokey the Bear sign telling
you how likely it is for the forest to burn. Like the cancer patient, “full remission” is the holy
grail in psychosis. The road there is strewn with “acute episodes” and “partial remissions,” and
for some even heavier bouts with “continuous” and/or “unspecified.” There is a heartwarming
version of this story I sometimes tell myself in which the happiness Jack found in our time
together cured her of her schizophrenia. There are pictures of Jack taken just before I was born in
which you can see her ferocity. She is feral. Wounded. Like a stray cornered by the dog catcher.
“Multiple episodes, currently in partial remission.” Later, though, in photographs where we are
feeding ducks or blowing out birthday candles, she is smiling. Consumed by the warmth of our
present tense. “Multiple episodes, currently in full remission.” It is a fantasy in which I often
indulge: my 66-year-old grandmother cured of her crazy by the mere coddling of her 3-year-old
grandson. As if I was a surprise hidden behind the doorway and her madness was a case of the
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hiccups. We are only ever degrees of hurt or healing to the people we love. Or some toxic
combination of the two.
I became less couth the longer I worked at Barbra Braun and Associates. More daring.
Quietly derelict. Prone to mischief. Self-consolation. Boundary-pushing. Because I couldn’t
manage to swell ATHAS STOMPER into some doorstop tome that held itself together without
disintegrating mid-sentence, I defaulted to insinuating ATHAS STOMPER into the easily overlook-
able factoids and obscure citations that Ms. Braun had begun to trust me with. These were the
sorts of bottom-of-the-barrel assignments that had, for good reason, been passed over by the
Associates. My logic held that if an edit had fallen so far down the totem pole and into my lap, I
was free to do with it as I saw fit without fear of feather ruffling or retribution. My work was so
de-prioritized that it rarely garnered even a perfunctory once-over from higher-ups. My response
was to commit ATHAS STOMPER to posterity. To bring ATHAS STOMPER to (very marginalized) life.
Into a mass-produced book of worksheets meant to help Thai speakers learn English, for
instance, I offered this unorthodox example: ATHAS STOMPER shone like a city on a hill. In an
manual for fabricating a series of aeronautical sprockets, a quote on the import of safety: A spill,
a slip, a hospital trip. —ATHAS STOMPER, foreman. As a reaction to the literary bloviating that
usually characterized my approach to ATHAS STOMPER, I became obsessed with trying to create
whole alternate worlds in as few words as possible—to connote in those four syllables the
infinite impossibilities that other books spent whole volumes trying to fabricate. In the Field
Guide to Central Idaho Water Tables, I snuck into a paragraph about the Sawtooth National
Forest an entirely non-existent species of trout: As a result of the close proximity of this trio of
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peaks—Williams, Thompson, and Horstmann—Redfish Lake usually enjoys an exaggerated
concentration of mineral deposits, especially magnesium sulfate. This, in turn, creates an ideal
condition for many types of trout, including but not limited to Rainbow, Bull, ATHAS STOMPER,
and Dolly Varden varieties. I felt an addictive power in these line-item fabrications. As
unassuming as they might be, floating them directly out into the real world had a different
potency than the inevitable failure of crafting blatant fictions about ATHAS STOMPER. These
deceptions were innocuous, but they also had the ability to tinker with the world in tangible
ways. The more I sprinkled the literature with ATHAS STOMPER, the more I imagined it taking on
a life of its own, blurring the boundary between word and world until, perhaps, the two
conflated. Fused. Cohered. I began to see ATHAS STOMPER as a subversive art project, or maybe
even an organic critique on the way we operated in The City of the Future. I thought of ATHAS
STOMPER as a safeguard against our tendency towards unmitigated accumulation and glut and
redundancy—of language, of information, of facts so pliable they were liable to become opinion.
Like a death by a million invisible paper cuts, I began supplying dark corners of our
informational overload with ATHAS STOMPER simulacra, charlatans, and imposters. I saw them as
rocks in the shoe. I saw them as thorns in the side. My own private protest played out across
greater Canadian mulch salinity spreadsheets, updated bylaws for the Spanish Typographic
Workers Trade Union, and data sets describing the transportation routes undertaken by the
sudden influx of mobile morgues. Two refrigeration units roundtrip from Baton Rouge to ATHAS
STOMPER, I wrote, were required for the months of both May and June.
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It is of interest that we call the insane the “insane” and not the “unsane.” In practice, this
is a simple matter of Latin versus Old English derivation. And yet. And still. Though “insane”
employs the Latin negation in-, thus suggesting an individual who is, definitively, “not of sound
mind,” I am tempted always to think of that first syllable as a preposition instead. I am tempted
to think of the insane as those individuals who exists within the parameters of sanity, who have
looked and found this world wanting, who go about their day in healthy reaction to The City of
the Future—literally, as it were, in-sane. I am tempted, often, to think of the rest of us as crazy.
Unhealthy. The unsane.
It is true that there are other sidewalks in other cities which readily attract the sort of
attention I lavished on ATHAS STOMPER. I know this. I have seen them. The Hollywood Walk of
Fame, for instance, whose more than 2,500 300-pound slabs of coral-colored terrazzo house the
shiny brass stars which attract more than ten million gawking tourists a year. Or the swirling sea
plants and spiral ammonites imprinted into the grey-blue hexagonal panots lining Barcelona’s
Passeig de Gracia. Designed by Gaudí, these tiles are chronically pried-free in the night by
pilferers in the market for an authentic Catalan souvenir. These are destination sidewalks. Well-
planned stretches of iconic walkway cared for by a team of high-paid engineers, designers, city
planners, and tourism boards whose job it is to embed the spirit of a given locale within the
pathways that traverse it. These sidewalks are celebrities. The black-and-white Carioca swirls of
the Ipanema boardwalk. The wobble of the Appian Way. The bright orange Senbon Torii gates
which lead to Kyoto’s Fushimi Inari-taisha shrine. These are cultural icons and, as such, they are
fabricated with the sort of consideration and craftsmanship which it is not peculiar to fetishize or
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obsess over, as people sometimes do. There are postcards. There are t-shirts. There are
longwinded tours made on Segway. Articles in airplane magazines. Theses. Dissertations. Etc.
Before my sister told me, I never knew the side of the first house I grew up in at 811
Anita was dirt. This is no grand revelation—underneath all of our concretes there is dirt. It was
dirt before it became concrete, and one day it will return to dirt as well. Ashes to ashes. Dirt to
dirt. Etc. But because my memory of 811 Anita begins only after the concrete was poured on the
side of the house, after my sister and I semi-spontaneously put our handprints into it as it set, it
never once occurred to me that the side of the house was anything other than concrete. To think
about it as dirt—as fertile soil—is like rewinding the tape to more halcyon times. Our pastoral
past. A situation conducive to breathing, thinking, looking—splaying yourself out on a patch of
wild grass before concrete took over the world underfoot, looking up idly to find the pictures
hidden in clouds. Which is exactly what was missing from New York. Which is, in some sense,
how New York tends to win. How it tends to beat you down. Punish you. At a certain point, I
began to realize that there was quite literally no place I could look that wasn’t in some way
molested by human interference. The apartments and skyscrapers and streets and cars and busses
and sidewalks and trash and trashcans meant to collect it. Even those ingredients borrowed
(prostituted?) from nature—trees and flowers and Great Lawns and the Central Parks that
amassed them—even when the natural world was allowed to flourish, it was manipulated by
human hands, planned in great detail by famed turn-of-the-century landscape artists down to the
last shrub, stripping the “wild” from wilderness, neutering its tendency to run amok with planters
and medians and flowerbeds and city gardens and the bureaucracy of city planners whose job it
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was to decide exactly how far one tree must be from the next. Every mature oak, every flimsy
sapling tethered with green tape is simply a reminder of how unnatural the natural world feels in
the cold, calculated Cittá Nuova.
I began to resent ATHAS STOMPER for its role in perpetuating The City of the Future. I
began to see ATHAS STOMPER as a symptom. A contagion. I couldn’t look anywhere without
seeing glass and concrete and stone. It pervaded every space, and yet remained cold and callous.
How many times had I passed by, over, near ATHAS STOMPER, fabricating histories and futures,
concocting elaborate charades and possibilities, and yet how little I actually knew about ATHAS
STOMPER. How little I could know about ATHAS STOMPER. ATHAS STOMPER was not unlike our
neighbor in #47 who had lengthy, graying dreadlocks and a broad porcelain smile, and who I
suspected sold to men and women half his age and a fraction his complexion a highly impressive
strain of marijuana (his doorbell rang incessantly at all hours), but to whom—though for two
years I could hear through our shared wall all of his comings, goings, toilet flushings, etc.—
remained a man I never once formally introduced myself, choosing instead the simple,
uncomplicated relationship established by a “Good morning!” in passing or a nod near the bank
of sticky mailboxes in the lobby. Part of The Human Condition is to know the pattern of
someone’s bowel movements without ever knowing their name. Part of The Human Condition is
to refer to people by the alphanumerics of their apartment. “We don’t kill the roaches anymore,”
wrote Hunter S. Thompson, one floor above me, fifty-plus years prior, “just wound them and let
them writhe and die wherever they please.”
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I had similar arrangements—detentes—with most of the ensemble cast of characters that
paraded through my day as if on cue: the young black woman who each afternoon delivered the
mail to the aforementioned sticky mailboxes with bass-heavy music blaring out from her
heavily-padded headphones; the inexplicably happy homeless man to whom I sporadically
offered my pocket change at the corner outside of the Apple Tree Deli; the security guards—five
in total, I believe—hired to patrol the neighborhood, which took a turn for the seedy after dark.
“Hey,” I said to them, nodding. “’Sup,” they replied without looking. Though my conversations
with this presumably lovely cast of characters never developed past cordial greetings and a flash
of smile, it was exactly this at-arm’s-lengthedness which, I am sure, guaranteed that our
interactions remained cordial and lovely in the first place. Because what The City of the Future
taught me was that, if I was honest, I wanted nothing to do with these people. Nothing at all. Not
with any of them. And they, I’m quite sure, wanted nothing to do with me. We had chosen to
populate a city that reminded us at every turn how little we appreciated its populace. Chance had
dealt us into the same hand, and we each were merely doing our best to play nice. To coexist. To
placate and defer. It is a baffling symptom of city life which compels us to recoil from the very
people most privy to our daily regimens. Those that see us pick up newspapers in our underwear
and who bear the pants and groans of our pornographies through paper-thin walls. As if a rote
daily performance of fleeting bonhomie might cloak our more private animal in a forcefield of
good humor, winks, and nods. This detachment—this shallow-end acquaintancing—when
combined with the near-daily frequency of our interactions, suffocated me. In despair, I resorted
to fabricating whole lives for them in my imagination. Physical traits, habitual gesticulations,
clothing, distinctive facial expressions, accents, the pitch and timbre of their voice—these
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fragments offered themselves to me like a basket of ingredients which I was free to combine and
recombine into patchwork lives which were as vivid to me as they were wholly invented. And I
did not invent pleasantries. I made them crooks. I made them pedophiles. I imagined the
flatulence-soaked cushions of their ratty couch. Adding this imaginary flesh to the bare bones of
our limited interactions was a habit I employed in an instinctual effort to stave-off the crippling
mundanity which streamrolled across whole swathes of the day. Lonelinesses. Boredoms. The
numbness which chokeholds the daily commute. Winter coats. Half-windsor knots. A slab of
recurrent sidewalk.
I made my way from Brooklyn to Morningside Heights on foot. For better or worse,
nothing had changed. When Ms. Braun fired me, it was in that matter-of-fact tone that pervaded
New York City like a definition. “What in the fuck do you think you’re doing?” she said,
nudging me back toward the elevator doors, a stack of ATHAS STOMPERs in hand . “Just who
in the fuck do you think you are?” Now I was in her Union Square, marching along her
Broadway, stopping for sparkling lemonades near her Grand Central Station, eating pretzels in
her Columbus Circle, many years removed from the white flag I had waved so vigorously. When
I left, it was because I had had enough. Because the city was engulfing me. But I had returned
out of love. To pay homage to first blush. If my retreat from New York had been a crash of
symbols, the comeback I mounted was a lonely echo. A loop of monotonous feedback. I began
trudging northward through the noontime heat in a lucid dream, hot in pursuit of nostalgia’s
greatest hits. The courthouse where I saw a BMX bicycler explode his kneecap onto the
pavement after Jonny’s wedding. The Betsey Johnson where Natasha invited me into the
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dressing room. The fire hydrant to which a friend-once-removed chained himself in protest of
Chinese civil rights abuses. The street where Gwen’s boyfriend was hit and killed by a taxi. The
Jazz at Lincoln Center theater where Gwen and I watched Neko Case ring in winter’s first snow.
There is something incredibly pleasant about stomping on old grounds you have no further use
for. I returned to these scenes instinctively—the Chrysler, the Jackie Onassis, the Alma Mater. I
anticipated an animal magnetism. A communion. To be mesmerized. Worried, perhaps, that I
might contract a case of what if? or a gentle longing for what could have been. But at every turn
it felt like a triumph. Like I was putting something to bed. Singing something to sleep.
But then, during those two sweltering summer hours that I searched desperately and in
vain for ATHAS STOMPER, I grew increasingly convinced that I had become my Grandma Jack.
I know how this sounds.
And yet.
Tell me how else to explain it?
What I tell people now is to imagine that some small, seemingly-insignificant fact which
you rarely think about and which you take wholly for granted—but which nonetheless underpins
your very existence—imagine this fact has suddenly and without warning been eclipsed by the
shadow of an overwhelming doubt. Think faulty wiper blades, I tell them, in a sudden torrential
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downpour. An errant goose sucked up into the engine of a 747. The moment when, as a child,
you first recognize the waft of Uncle Rick’s cologne under Santa’s beard. Such that, in an instant,
though this detail had always seemed unimportant—inconsequential—its sudden fraudulence
cascades through you in a wave of aggressive, generalized panic. Think: the demotion of Pluto.
Think: that brand of five o’clock light which during bouts of bedridden sickness or depression
fails to enunciate from which side of the meridian it has originated. Think: the jackknife of an
outbound bullet train.
Nothing about my demeanor during those two hours would have alarmed any of my
fellow New York City pedestrians or suggested to them the dramatic transformation taking place
within me. Like them, I was but traipsing through the city, block after block, possessed of that
aggressive, purposeful stride native to the seasoned metropolitan. And, like them, I was doing my
damnedest to ignore that particular sensation which accompanies a summertime stroll between
skyscrapers of having become a tiny ant spotlit by the deadly beam of a well-magnified sun.
It was hot. In the vicinity of noon. I was hungry. Sweating. Eyes fixated on the sidewalk.
To the casual observer, I would have seemed but another unremarkable addition to the
ceaseless swarm of foot traffic which at all times of day, regardless of season, in every brand of
weather, sees fit to grind its soles deep into the city’s endless expanse of crumbling pavements
and jagged asphalts. Because, if nothing else, New York is a city made for walking. For walkers.
It teems with footsteps. It is alive with the dance of improvised trajectories. The great
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metropolises of our earth are constructed—sometimes purposefully—to prioritize certain modes
of ambulation over others. “The street,” wrote Sant’Elia “will no longer lie like a doormat at
ground level, but will plunge many stories down into the earth, embracing the metropolitan
traffic, and will be linked up for necessary interconnections by metal gangways and swift-
moving pavements.” Cities like Los Angeles, Melbourne, and Vancouver have amassed a
suburban scale that demands the automobile. Other cities, like San Francisco and Amsterdam,
have asserted their preference for the bicycle with dedicated lanes and signage that pleads for
transit equality. But New York—like Rome, like Paris, like London—is, absolutely, a city made
for walking. For walkers. Amblers. Galavanters. Wanderers, meanderers. It suffers the vehicles
which clutter its streets and subterranean luges like they were a regretfully necessary evil. Which
is not to say that these mechanized forms of transport are necessarily less effective than walking.
Just that the subtle treasures which best define New York City are hidden, smeared, and muted
from the vantage of a taxicab or MTA bus or subway car, and come into clear focus only for
those that choose to pursue the beautiful come-what-may of a New York City stroll. I am talking,
of course, about the smell of MSG in the morning. About the surge of gail-force winds which
hurl southward down the avenues in winter. About the sound of a swish as it sinks into a chain-
link net. And the inundation of sirens, mustard stains, jackhammering, panty lines, steam vents,
etc. which prefigures the general malaise of every Knickerbocker’s stroll. But, unlike the throng
of midday pedestrians to which I belonged, my line of sight was directed that day towards the
ground not in some excusable effort to avoid unwanted human interaction, nor because I was lost
in a swim of work-oriented calculations, nor even because I had succumbed to the shellshock of
the city’s cacophony. I was staring at the ground for an altogether different—and increasingly
!195
more frantic—reason. I had returned to the city after many years away and, on a whim, and
because I am prone to bouts of nostalgia, after having paid photographic tribute to Shelburne-
Hall—the corner apartment building I once, along with a rotating cast of international scholars,
called home—I decided to hunt down ATHAS STOMPER and pay it my respects as well.
But when I arrived at the slab of sidewalk where ATHAS STOMPER should be—where for
nearly two years I had passed by, over, or near it, at least two times a day, going and coming—
ATHAS STOMPER was gone. Disappeared. Vanished. Without a trace.
I cannot begin to describe the way my stomach swam. Or the feeling I had that my luck
had finally ran out. That the jig was up. That I had been found out. In a sense, recalled.
Incredulous, I did a 360-degree spin, slowly, spreading my gaze out wider and wider as I did,
figuring that my mind had misplaced the exact position of ATHAS STOMPER by a slab or two. It
had been years since I had been here. Some confusion was, I told myself, understandable. All of
the storefronts that I remembered were there—Apple Tree Deli, Hartley Pharmacy, Subs
Conscious, Ye Olde Dry Cleaners. The pizza place had switched names, but remained a pizza
place. And, at the corner, what used to be an antiquarian bookstore had morphed into a stationary
store. Otherwise, everything added up. Everything checked out. Except for the lack of ATHAS
STOMPER.
The mind seeks in situations of intense confusion like this the most direct and obvious
resolution. For me, that meant glancing casually at the neighboring sidewalk to find evidence
!196
that, perhaps, it had been re-poured. This seemed the most logical explanation. Though our
concrete is capable of outliving us, another reason for its abundance is that it is so capable of
covering its own errant tracks. Unlike stone or iron or glass, concrete takes well to mulligan. In
as casual a manner possible, trying hard not to look suspicious enough to see something say
something, I strolled the block hungry for proof that during the interim, someone had been
dispatched to pour new concrete and smooth-over ATHAS STOMPER. Finding even one square of
freshly poured concrete would have gone a long way towards putting me at ease, would have
confirmed for me the probability that ATHAS STOMPER had been put to pasture by the civic need
for a smoother public surface. And when, in fact, I found a slab or two that seemed newer,
seemed brighter, unadorned, I was buoyed. I stood for a moment and tried to take shelter from
the growing sense of rupture that had begun to spread throughout my body. Try, though, as I
might, I knew that I was only fooling myself. These new slabs were poured too close to the dry
cleaner storefront to have been responsible for killing ATHAS STOMPER. The ATHAS STOMPER of
my memory was closer to the street, capable of being splashed by busses passing in rain. And,
too, these freshly poured slabs were smaller and carried an irregular dimension that the ATHAS
STOMPER of my memory certainly did not. I found a clean portion of façade and leaned against
the bricks. Tried to remain as calm as I could. Tried to keep breathing. While the world snagged
around me.
My Grandma Jack was so convinced that a man in New Jersey was broadcasting
transcontinental, pathogenic radio waves into her skull that she shielded herself, from time to
time, by wrapping her scalp in aluminum foil like it was a helmet. We learned this in the days
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following her half-naked episode on the street with the man—“The man! The man!”—from
doctors at the Del Amo Hospital in Torrance, California. So far as they could surmise, she had
stopped taking her meds some weeks before and was self-medicating with alcohol and cigarettes.
This relapse concurred with, or was possibly precipitated by, a mild stroke, though this
hypothesis remained inconclusive. In conversations with them, she exhibited a reticence to
speak. She would say things like, “I know what you’re up to.” She would say things like, “You
leave me alone!” Large parts of me were proud of her for this defiance. This was the Jackie that I
knew and loved. She was distrustful of everyone, and demanded constantly to be returned home
to her apartment, decreed that she was being kept against her will. From time to time, though,
she would calm long enough to tell doctors about this man, about the radio waves, about how he
was trying to kill her. Her concocted science deemed this thin layer of light metal an
impenetrable forcefield. She was safe in her tin foil hat. Or safe-adjacent. I was not privy to these
admissions, but I remember being told various versions of her truth from my mother, from my
father and stepmother, in the days that followed. More than anything, I found it embarrassing. I
was upset. That this scenario fit so snugly into our stereotype of the insane bothered me far more,
I think, than the simple fact of her insanity itself. Perhaps this was my immaturity? Perhaps this
was my incredulity? The suddenness of her violent break from reality hit me in barrages. I went
from tears to denial within the same breath. Most of me, at the time, still felt confident that my
Grandma Jack would re-up her meds and return in no time. The well-trod trope of the tin foil hat
suggested to me that she, to a certain extent, was performing her craziness. That parts of her
(sub)conscious were so thoroughly steeped in our pop culture paradigm of the crazy, and were
smart enough to offer it back up as evidence that she’d slipped into it. I was upset that even in
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her failure to grasp reality, she was slave to the stereotypes in which it traffics. I wanted, instead,
for my grandmother a more eccentric insane. For her innate creativity to have kinked her crazy
into something more flamboyant. Something more daring and original. For her Lay-Z-Boy, for
example, to have been possessed by, say, the voice of a 15
th
century witch. Or her larynx to have
housed a miniaturized army of mocking birds armed with an encyclopedic knowledge of the
great American songbook. To have capitulated to such a classic narrative of psychosis was
disappointing, almost as if she was toying with us, as if the whole thing was an elaborate
practical joke. This frequency modulation boogieman was not known to us, her family, by any
proper name. We never learned much more than the general contours of his aggression towards
my Grandma Jack. This may, in retrospect, be a result of hardheadedly tuning out Jack’s fearful
protestations during the high-tension interventions that immediately followed this last of her
great schisms. Wrapping our arms around her, pulling her face deep into our shoulder to shush
her, we may very well have let his appellation float by us in a muffled squeal, as if by ignoring
his name we were invalidating his existence.
A few weeks after my grandmother went crazy for the last time, she stopped talking. To
me. To my mother. To anyone. Within months, she fell into what the DSM calls “Catatonic
Disorder Due to Another Medical Condition,” a condition whose diagnosis requires three (or
more) of the following symptoms:
1. Stupor (i.e., no psychomotor activity; not actively relating to environment).
2. Catalepsy (i.e., passive induction of a posture held against gravity).
3. Waxy flexibility (i.e., slight, even resistance to positioning by examiner).
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4. Mutism (i.e., no, or very little, verbal response [Note: not applicable if there is an
established aphasia]).
5. Negativism (i.e., opposition or no response to instructions or external stimuli).
Posturing (i.e., spontaneous and active maintenance of a posture against gravity).
Mannerism (i.e., odd, circumstantial caricature of normal actions).
6. Stereotypy (i.e., repetitive, abnormally frequent, non-goal-directed movements).
Agitation, not influenced by external stimuli.
7. Grimacing.
8. Echolalia (i.e., mimicking another’s speech). Echopraxia (i.e., mimicking
another’s movements).
We took no pictures of her. We had no conversations with her. From time to time we
would wheel her out onto the veranda. We asked her rhetorical questions about birds. About the
weather. It was difficult to have such one-sided repartee. We would celebrate her birthday by
bringing her cake and eating it, too. From time to time we found bruises on her forearms and
demanded an explanation. “What are these bruises from!” we demanded to know. We moved her
from this facility to that. We dropped off adult diapers to the small, foreign-born nurses that
washed her, fed her, changed her. “Okay, Ms. Jackie,” they would say, wheeling her to us at the
front desk. We brought her Christmas presents and opened them, too. An old music box of hers
we found going through forgotten boxes during a recent move. Small pictures of her teenage
grandchildren to keep by her bed, their faces changing so drastically year to year.
I did not feel quite the way my Grandma Jack looked that day I came home at fifteen- or
sixteen-years-old and found her half-naked on the street yelling, “The man! The man!” My
psychosis was quieter. Introspective. I heard no voices. I felt no pain. I had no fear that radio
waves or “vapours” were busy at work scrambling my brain or Lobster-cracking my body. I
simply darted my eyes back and forth, grasping at some last-gasp possibility that I wasn’t
!200
actually crazy. I walked slowly down 120
th
Street—maybe ATHAS STOMPER ran east-west, not
north-south? I shuffled down Morningside Drive, smiling politely at the young couple who
passed with a baby in tow. A big, round baby. “Hi!” I said, absentmindedly. But the longer on it
went that I could not find ATHAS STOMPER, the more I began to resign myself to the fact that I
had spent two years of my life communing with a slab of sidewalk that I invented. That didn’t
exist. The absurdity of the situation wasn’t lost on me. That, in the first place, I had spent so
much energy on something so mundane, something so pedestrian as a slab of sidewalk. But that
at least in that version of the world, where ATHAS STOMPER was an actual, tangible facet of the
living, breathing world, I had only then obsessed over it because I was eccentric. Not, as it was
dawning on me now, because I was insane. Unsane. Whatever. And it wasn’t the sidewalk that
was the issue. The sidewalk was merely a symptom. A clue. A lynchpin. A confirmation that I
had somehow contracted my grandmother’s lunacy. What bothered me there, what shook me
then, searching ant-like under all that glass and concrete and stone for ATHAS STOMPER, the sun
becoming more and more intense the longer ATHAS STOMPER went M.I.A., what I increasingly
came face-to-face with was the implication that if ATHAS STOMPER wasn’t real, if ATHAS
STOMPER was never anything more than a figment of my delusional imagination, if ATHAS
STOMPER was a farce, a charade, a charlatan, what this in fact implied, what this in fact
confirmed, like it or not, was that nothing was real, or rather, that everything was uncertain,
everything was subject to the same sort of ATHAS STOMPER effect, if you could call it that, if you
wanted to go ahead and call it that, everything that I put faith in, from my name and date of birth
to the alphanumerics of my social security, every first kiss, every first fuck, every pool, every
social studies, every Rutgers University, every microwavable popcorn and puddle of gametes
!201
spilt on the hotel comforter, every skinned knee, every thirst, every mushroom cloud, every
Ponzi scheme, every “kiss begins with Kay,” every trip to Kuai when my parents were still trying
to keep the marriage alive, every bout of chickenpox, both instances of Methicillin-resistant
Staphylococcus aureus, that concussion snowboarding in Tahoe, that concussion playing rugby in
Kutztown, these graves we kept having to dig deeper and deeper, the Social Democrats, the
Society of the Spectacle, the Richter scale, every hand held, every feel copped, every mold, every
pogs, every ethernet, every sex ed and every Golgi apparatus—if ATHAS STOMPER didn’t exist, it
meant that every concrete fact around which my life was oriented was in jeopardy, was in doubt,
was entirely up for grabs. I walked on, unsure.
The list of side effects attached to the antipsychotic drugs prescribed for schizophrenics at
the turn of the 21
st
century were typical of most prescription drugs that target the brain (nausea,
vomiting, diarrhea, drowsiness, anxiety, skin rash, blurred vision, etc.), but also threatened much
more dramatic damage—irregular heartbeats, renal failure, and tardive dyskinesia, a condition
that results in involuntary movements of the limbs and face, and (for men) prolonged erection.
As with any medicine, antipsychotics are a high-stakes calculus of risk versus reward. These pills
or serums or injections alter the biochemistry of the human brain such that “extra-sensual
phenomena” are denied access to the neural pathways responsible for “manifestation.” This
involves serotonin, re-uptake, microbiologies still not fully understood. In layman’s terms, these
drugs turned off the voices in my grandmother’s head. She was able to navigate the litany of
daily errands without being interrupted by the overwhelming sensation that invisible radio waves
were targeting the mechanics of her brain with destructive malice. These drugs dulled the
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unobservable pantomimes that played themselves out upon the observable dioramas of her day-
to-day: the Pacific Coast Highway, Ralph’s Supermarket, Red Carpet Car Wash, the 7-11
cigarette dispenser, the Riviera Hall Lutheran School car drop-off/pick-up procession, the
cockpit of her two-tone Cadillac. Many describe the patient treated with antipsychotics as
subdued. The word for me conjures images of the handcuffed criminal. Or, perhaps, the restraint
performed upon the body of the insane via straightjacket. In essence, these drugs are habitually
guilty of working too well. So well, in fact, that they dull and subdue fare more than just the
pathological whimsies they are meant to target. Patients routinely describe feeling detached from
their lives. As if they are merely characters being nudged about by an omniscient narrator. The
initial quiet arrives as a contrast of calm that follows the ravage of an unruly storm. These drugs
are a relief from the constant threat of chaos that lurks throughout the days of the unmedicated
mind. But maybe, too, it is too quiet. Boredom may best describe the best case scenario. A swing
of the pendulum so far away form psychosis that psychosis seems never to have been a problem
in the first place. Patients describe a “former life” in the way Jekyl might refer to Hyde. And in
what doctors expectantly refer to as “relapse,” the drugs which settle the dust do so so
thoroughly that they are capable of suggesting to the schizophrenic their own superfluidity. The
sick are often too eager to declare “full remission” and assume that they’ll be able to stay there of
their own accord. Or with booze. And cigarettes.
My grandmother called me the same thing she was forced to call her firstborn, my father.
“Alfred,” she would say, “get your ass in here and do your homework!” She would say, “Your
dinner’s catching cold!” It was not her fault she had to call me this. She had very little to do with
!203
the naming of her Alfreds. My name, like my father’s, was the result of an insurmountable
pressure to move yet another Roman numeral deeper into suffix. Each sequential suffix carries
with it a greater inertia than its predecessor. “Jr.” gives way to the far more regal “III,” the
characters themselves carrying the visual heft of the Roman columns from whence they
originate. And the implied mathematics of “IV” confer it is greater than “III” even though it has
one less character. These are appellations that derive their power from continuity. The larger the
numeral, the more remarkable and precarious the feat becomes, like the last acrobat to climb to
the top of some human pyramid, the entire structure threatening its own demise. Hers was a
voice prone to exclamation, in part because she often hollered instructions from across the house,
in part a result of decades spent as the lone matriarch in a five-person household. But I wonder
now how much these moments with me were an echo? A live-action déjà vu? As if my
grandmother was reliving the difficult years of her early motherhood, chasing another Alfred
around the house, demanding some thirty-plus years apart that Alfred come inside from playing
ball once the streetlights began to shine at dusk. I wonder now how recyclical life must have felt
for Jack, to have successfully navigated through the center of a turbulent century raising one
(stubborn) Alfred only to find herself at its close raising yet another, just as stubborn. There is,
perhaps, a swagger to the redux—a sense of expertise wrought from the rookie mistakes made
prior. So, too, though, must it have been a cruel hall of mirrors. Like getting to your car only to
realize you’ve left the keys behind in the house, futility pangs growing with each retraced step.
!204
When I finally found ATHAS STOMPER, it was not on the block of Amsterdam Avenue
between 120
th
and 119
th
Streets, as I would have wagered my life, but, rather, one block south on
Amsterdam Avenue between 119
th
and 118
th
Streets.

Words are futile devices for the sensation I felt finally being reunited with ATHAS
STOMPER. They talk of love at first sight as if you’re floating on thin air. This was the opposite—
as if was coming back down to Earth, planting my feet on solid ground. I took this picture mere
moments after I made eye contact with ATHAS STOMPER. I didn’t want to let it get away again—
ATHAS STOMPER nor my mind. I’m not sure how many others passed by me as I stood there, but I
no longer cared to put up any false pretenses. Some slowed down as they approached me to
regard ATHAS STOMPER, too, following my fixated gaze down to the sidewalk. I exchanged
!205
Figure 25
bemused smirks with a woman talking loudly on a cell phone about ambulance chasers who,
seeing me frozen in the middle of the sidewalk, paused both her conversation and gait, regarded
first me and then ATHAS STOMPER, then nodded her head to communicate some form of approval.
Other than its southern migration, ATHAS STOMPER was exactly as I remembered it. Though both
words were written in all-caps, there was a dynamic explosion of font size for the second word
that always suggested to me an exaggerated vocal inflection, as if to pronounce ATHAS correctly
it must be whispered, while STOMPER must be screamed. Either that or that the two words were
separate entities altogether, like a comedic duo, a 21
st
-century update to Abbott and Costello.
This second theory always seemed the more likely on account not just of the divergent font sizes
of the two words but also of the distinctive fonts themselves. It didn’t take a handwriting expert
to see that ATHAS was written in squat, terse strokes while STOMPER was all wisp and
flourish. I indulged briefly in the nostalgia of all the people and places and ideas ATHAS STOMPER
had been over the years, but yanked myself back to the moment, snapping more photographs,
and documenting the scene for posterity. A new-ish stand of CITI bikes had been installed on the
curb beside ATHAS STOMPER. And looming above us was a building I had passed so many times
without noting—the Croton Aqueduct Pumphouse. Its thick stone structure was slightly charred
in various locations and was ringed with a fence to bar trespassers entrance, and the grass around
it was wild and unwieldy. And all over the ground was detritus that wouldn’t have registered on a
typical day. I noted rubber bands, cigarette butts, a wayward red grape, leaves in varying states of
decay, spat gum in varying states of decay, golden cabinet hardware, one very used Q-tip, a
section of the New York Times from July 20
th
which featured an article on Ally Sheedy, a torn
!206
prescription for a drug called Midazolam (6mg), and a business card for an attorney-at-law
named Robert G. Goodman, P.C.
!
I was suddenly struck with the need to know everything about ATHAS STOMPER. I was no
longer content simply to fabricate its past, present, and future. ATHAS STOMPER had a real history,
and I wanted to know it. Someone(s) had, at some point, come upon this patch of freshly poured
cement and scrawled ATHAS STOMPER into existence. It struck me in that moment just how odd it
was that I had never thought about this before. That I had never inquired. That while I had
forever thought of ATHAS STOMPER as my own, had for so long kept it a secret like an ace up my
storytelling sleeve, there was at least one other living, breathing person—but probably two, and
perhaps more—who knew about ATHAS STOMPER not because they happened to walk past it on
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Figure 26
their daily commute, but because they had created ATHAS STOMPER in the first place themselves.
And were, barring tragedy, waiting patiently for me to find them.
In my favorite photograph of her, taken when she is in her early-thirties—by then,
already a mother of three mischievous boys—she is radiant, as the saying goes, her eyes looking
slightly above and beyond the camera lens, as if towards some lovely, magnetic future in her
just-around-the-bend. By that time, her hair was already shorn short, but it still possessed the
grace and flare of a woman enamored more with a young Aretha than a fallen Caesar. One
sideburn tress swoops elegantly down her left cheek, separating her ear from her face, a bright,
white pearl accenting the tip of the lock like an exclamation point, or perhaps a question mark. In
this photograph, which was made by R. E. Condit Fine Portraits in East Orange, New Jersey
during the middle part of last century, my grandmother wears a smile that I can’t help but
imagine is genuine. There is a lightness to it, as if it was not a burden to put on, as if, perhaps,
she hadn’t even been instructed to provide it yet, as if it might, at that time, have been a natural
response to some fleeting joy she actually felt in real-time.
!208
!
The 2
nd
edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons released its Dark Sun Boxed Set in
1991. The garish artwork gracing the cover depicts hellish, muscle-bound creatures wielding
instruments of antiquated war engaged in hand-to-hand combat amidst a barren desert landscape
!209
Figure 27
pocked with cylindrical mesas and a cragged outcroppings. Far to the left, standing above the
fracas, is an ominous skeletal creature dressed all in black that harkens back to villains found in
Bruegel, its head crowned with aggressive horns.

!
Inside the box are found all sorts of game-playing materials: a Dungeon Master’s Book, maps, a
Rules Book, Player Aid Cards, a pamphlet entitled “A Little Knowledge”, and something called
The Wanderer’s Journal, which begins its first chapter with the first person narration of a hero in
medias res:
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Figure 28
I live in a world of fire and sand. The crimson sun scorches the life from anything that
crawls or flies, and storms of sand scourge the foliage from the barren ground. Lightning
strikes from the cloudless sky, and peals of thunder roll unexplained across the vast
tablelands. Even the wind, dry and searing as a kiln, can kill a man with thirst.
This is a land of blood and dust, where tribes of feral elves sweep out of the salt
plains to plunder lonely caravans, mysterious singing winds call men to slow suffocation
in the Sea of Silt, and legions of slaves clash over a few bushels of moldering grain. The
dragon despoils entire cities, while selfish kings squander their armies raising gaudy
palaces and garish tombs.
This is my home, Athas. It is an arid and bleak place, a wasteland with a handful of
austere cities clinging precariously to a few scattered oases. It is a brutal and savage land,
beset by political strife and monstrous abominations, where life is grim and short.
I purchase the Dark Sun Boxed Set used online, and when it comes I sift through its
materials, overwhelmed by seeing ATHAS printed so many times, over and over, in a serifed font
rather than a handwritten scrawl. “Athas is a desert—sun-scorched and wind-scoured, parched
and endless,” it says. “Breezes on Athas are suffocating and dust-laden, caking everything they
touch with yellow-orange silt, spoiling food, and filling a man’s eyes with pastry mud,” it says.
“As dangerous as it is, the wind is merely an inconvenience when compared to the greatest
danger of Athas—the lack of water,” it says. I have never played Dungeons & Dragons, and I do
not expect to start because of this. Instead, I feel simultaneously affirmed and gut-punched. I had,
for nearly a decade, felt unique in my affair with ATHAS STOMPER. I knew of no one else who had
so often rolled those syllables around his mouth. To find an entire faceless, basement-dwelling
community had been doing the same, and had been doing the same since long before I was,
peeved me. What’s worse, this community was rolling ATHAS around their mouths to much the
same effect as I was: fabricating a story about it out of thin air, whim, and whole-cloth invention.
I scoured through the materials, worried that I might quickly find not just ATHAS but also
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STOMPER lurking in the literature, summarily solving the mystery of my obsession with a toss of
twelve-sided die. Could it have been that I wasted so much of my brain space perseverating on a
phrase some nerd had obsessed over in a multi-week “campaign?” I did not want this to be the
case. This was a bedfellow with whom I did not wish to sleep. I read about Athas’s general
geography—“about” one million (one million!) square miles of desert punctuated by something
called the Sea of Silt and a “band of Tablelands ranging from as much as 400 miles wide to as
little as 50.” I read about the Athesian culture, its villages and dynastic merchant houses and
nomadic herdsmen who roamed “scrub plains, stony barrens, and sand dunes.” There were
supernatural forces in Athas, and “clerical magic” and “wizardry” and “psionic” powers, and a
history that could have passed for our own: “Athas is a barbaric shadow of some better world.”
Nervously, I turned to “Chapter Five: Monsters of Athas” and prepared for STOMPER to appear.
There were erdlus, kanks, mekillots, inix (inixes?), a belgoi, a dune freak, a gaj, silk wyrms,
giths, jozhals, and tembos, and even “humanoid giants” who “resemble massive humans standing
between 20 and 30 feet tall,” but nowhere (thankfully) were there “stompers.”
According to the DSM, “Late-onset cases (i.e., onset after age 40 years) are
overrepresented by females, who may have married. Often, the course is characterized by a
predominance of psychotic symptoms with preservation of affect and social functioning. Such
late-onset cases can still meet the diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia, but it is not yet clear
whether this is the same condition as schizophrenia diagnosed prior to mid-life (e.g., prior to age
55 years).”
!212
This comes as no surprise.
In the rough days when my parents’ divorce was still raw and my father was trying to find
a house with a proximity that allowed him to continue being my father, my grandmother often
came to my mother’s (her ex-daughter-in-law’s) defense, biology be damned. Her side-taking
shielded my mother from the pain her Alfred—their Alfred—inflicted. Their bond was forged in
the hot meat of rancid romance. It was commiseration. Empathy. An economy of parallel grief. I
do not have my Grandma Jack here to ask, but I suspect she felt guilty for her son’s betrayal.
Because she was a perfectionist and because she was inherently a proud, proud woman, and
because her children were, I’m sure she believed, a direct reflection of her, I am sure she felt
guilty when news of her son’s infidelity lead his nuclear family to meltdown. So that the
arguments became a sort of he said, she said, she said. But it must also be true that this was yet
another hall of mirrors. That each knockdown, drag-out triggered a sense memory of the
arguments she endured when her own philandering Alfred came home with foreign lipstick on
his collar. Given a long enough expanse of time, life begins not just to imitate itself, but to
repeat. With such a slim, finite set of circumstances between birth and rigor mortis, we are only
ever one groove away from the record skipping.
The Human Condition is a brutal and savage land. The Human Condition is beset by
political strife and monstrous abominations. The Human Condition is grim and short.
!213
There is a grand total of but thirteen dedicated and overworked men and women who
comprise the Sidewalks Division of New York City’s Department of Transportation.
Thirteen.
Collectively, this understaffed outfit undertakes the Sisyphean task of ensuring the proper
upkeep, maintenance, and rehabilitation of each and every slab of sidewalk which outlines, in
ten-to-fifteen-foot-wide spans, both sides of the approximately 6,200 miles of municipal streets,
avenues, and alleyways which are crammed into the city limits of its five boroughs. Thus, by
even the most modest of estimates, these thirteen surveyors, account managers, and engineers are
alone responsible for the health and well-being of something on the order of 124,000-square-
miles of bluestone, granite cobblestone, and, most commonly, quick-pour Portland-cement-
infused concrete which is trampled upon, traipsed across, rolled over, and shit on by the feet,
sneakers, rollerblades, bicycles, wheelchairs, crutches, and pet anuses of the more than 8,491,000
residents who call New York City their home. Plus tourists. And though these thirteen men and
women spend the vast brunt of their waking hours thanklessly ensuring that each and every step
taken along these sidewalks is safe and without hazard, it is true that the only time you might
ever think of them—or wonder who they are, or if a “they” even exists, or (more likely) if a
“they” can be sued—is when they have failed at their job and your stiletto snags on the lip of a
jagged crater or your chukka boot slips on an uneven pave and you either tumble or nearly
tumble onto your thence-skinned knees, or worse, in pain. The life of a Sidewalks Division
employee is one that I do not envy. They are paid a fraction of what they should be, not to enjoy
!214
the spotlight but to suffer the hot seat. And unlike other saves-the-day types—like firemen, or
police, or even exterminators—who are called into action by the go-for-broke, do-or-die pleas of
the distressed, and who may therefore arrive to fanfare befitting the shine of their badge, the
Sidewalks Division is mired in after-the-factness, complained to, sworn at, pestered, and reviled
for having done something, but never doing it quite good enough. Theirs is a marginalized
profession consumed with, quite literally, the margins.
“First of all,” says Dino Ng, “we call them flags.” He is the Associate Commissioner of
Infrastructure Design for New York’s Department of Transportation Sidewalks Division. I have
come to him in the hopes that he can tell me who made ATHAS STOMPER, or at least point me in
the right direction. There is a mountain of white, elongated papers covering his desk, and a stable
of Steelcase office chairs in a nearby hall. He is a full-bodied man who looks like he’s grown into
himself. Not fat, per se, but his stocky legs belie fitter decades spent in the rearview. Now, he
wields a respect-garnering paunch that leans over his belt and pairs perfectly with his deep-
palmed handshake. His hair is well-combed, parted on one side, and noticeably lacks the hint of
grey that would befit a man just six months away from retiring. He is talking to me about
nomenclature, correcting a mistake he says is as common as I might suspect. “Everyone gets that
wrong,” he says, “but, yeah—we don’t call them ‘slabs.’ Everything here is based off of five foot
by five foot flags. Sometimes, though,” he says as an afterthought, “trees get in the way.” He
gives me the standard specs for New York City sidewalks. How they must withstand a minimum
of 3,200 pounds of pressure per square inch. But usually are much stronger than that. How they
must have a special finishing coat to keep water from evaporating too fast during the curing
!215
process. He tells me that there are strict recipes for mixtures and strict protocols for pouring and
installing, that all of this is outlined in a “voluminous document” I can find online. He tells me
about High Early Strength concrete in front of the Holland Tunnel. He tells me about Capital
Construction projects. He tells me about the convoluted process of hotlines and complaints and
work orders and how residents and business owners have 45 days to comply with fix-it tickets
which are issued for any irregularities and/or trip hazards that measure a 1/2 inch in aberration or
more. He tells me about the way the Americans with Disabilities Act revolutionized his industry
in the early 1990s, how they are still more than twenty years later bringing slopes and curbs and
handicap ramps up to code. He tells me about unique sidewalks and landmark tinting and
heritage projects, like the preservation of Stone Street in the Financial District, which is the first
paved street in New York City and dates from Dutch colonial days and now passes through the
lobby of Goldman Sachs. He tells me about how dirty concrete is for the environment, about how
the department is pushing for greener technology, how they are trying to recycle glass back into
sand and then concrete. He tells me that the vast brunt of sidewalk repair is bid on and completed
by independent contractors. “Ninety-nine percent of the actual masonry gets contracted out,” he
says. He tells me about studying environmental engineering at the Brooklyn Technical High
School. He tells me about switching to civil engineering at San Jose State. About working at
Bechtel in Saudia Arabia. About how it feels to work for more than thirty years now for the same
public works department. About being a father and watching his children grow up in the streets
of New York. He shows me pictures of special projects he’s designed, like the Brooklyn
Waterfront Project which has embedded the shadow of a tree in bronze into the sidewalk. He
asks me, at one point, to remind him why, exactly, I’ve made an appointment to see him. “There
!216
was a flag you were interested in, right?” he says, looking back over an email I’ve sent him. And
when I show him the photo of ATHAS STOMPER, he says, “Oh.” And then, “Okay.” And then,
“One second.” He types some coded terms into his computer, which has many windows already
open with drawings and diagrams and overhead maps, and then sends something to his printer,
which, a moment later, he hands to me. “That’s your flag,” he says. “That’s what I got.” I stare at
the paper like it’s a holy grail. I tell him thank you. “Thank you, Dino,” I say. “I really appreciate
it.” He smiles at me. Asks me how old I am. Tells me that his daughter is a little bit younger than
me. Good luck, he tells me. “What we do, nobody knows we exist, and yet what we do is so
vital,” he says, and is right.

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Figure 29
On the same day that I am greeted by the invitation rat, I receive a mid-morning call from
Alfred Brown II asking if I’m free for lunch the following day. “Of course, gramps,” I tell him.
“Welcome to the neighborhood, champ,” he says. The following day, I receive a mid-morning
call from Alfred Brown III telling me that Alfred Brown II is dead. Of an apparent heart attack.
“Can you go to the apartment?” he says. “There’s paperwork to sign.” I am in a hardware store
on Amsterdam buying replacement lightbulbs and a mop. It is my third day in The City of the
Future. These are the early days of cellular telephonics, and the line keeps cutting out. “What?”
says my father, “Say again? What?” I am shaking, slightly. It is the death has ever gotten to me.
“Of course, pop,” I say, “no problem,” and leave without buying anything, my cart left there in
the middle of the store.
The archives for the Bloomingdale Asylum for the Insane are, as a result of institutional
procession, kept by the Medical Center Archives of NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell. To see
them, you have to navigate the still-very-active and chock-full-of-patients New York-
Presbyterian Hospital, whose lineage goes all the way back to the original New York Hospital
established in 1791. The archives themselves are kept in a small room on an upper floor reached
only by a special elevator servicing that register of the building. It takes me one email and two
explanations from lobby staff just to get it right. And when I finally arrive, I am told that there is
no photography allowed. And all notes I make must be in pencil and are subject to inspection. I
feel watched. I feel suspicious. The austere rules are a result of the sensitive and often intimate
!218
information kept within the temperature-controlled boxes and binders. There is a small box on a
counter measuring humidity. While state law prohibits research of institutional records until
twenty-five years after their date of creation, the material I ask to see is far, far older. One after
another, from ornate boxes tied with tinseled ribbon, or otherwise binders bound in leather and
wrapped tight in burlap, I am allowed to see page after calligraphic page of intake documents,
physician’s notes, case studies, and other marginalia that tell the story of Bloomingdale in the
fine-tooth grit of highly personal anecdote. Each page provokes a pity in me. This is how time
works, or doesn’t: I want to reach back through the pages to tell these doctors how things will be
in the future. To explain to them that restraints on this woman or that man surely, in my non-
medical-but-also-authoritative-because-I’m-from-the-future opinion, aren’t necessary. It is
incredibly difficult to read the elaborate penmanship, and parsing together even one (often
dramatic) sentence can be like translating from a dead language. I read about men howling in the
lodge. I read about a woman who serenades her dinner. And another, in agonizingly drawn-out,
line-by-line detail, who arrives at Bloomingdale with an altogether morose disposition. She is
wheeled in on a wheelchair and for days will not look any of the physicians in the eye. She is
unresponsive, but not yet catatonic—she will eat, she will drink. But as the days wear on, the
attending physician, whose cursive gets decidedly more ornamented the more dramatic the detail,
grows more despondent at her lack of willingness to engage. In the last entry, he describes her
final moments—how she bided her time during a routine dosing of meliorative tincture until the
attending physicians let their guard down. In a flash, she snatches up one of the glass bottles
from the cart, smashes it upon the pristine Bloomingdale wall, and jams the resulting shard of
glass so deep into her jugular that she is limp and lifeless within mere minutes. I tell the
!219
archivists over small talk that I’m there to do research for a book I’m writing about
schizophrenia. I tell them that in the rooms where some of these men and women at
Bloomingdale battled their crazy, I had long thereafter listened to a man read modern poems in
his native Italian tongue. This is how place works, or doesn’t. This ends up being an invitation to
further small talk that I do not want, but participate in. I am asked if I am looking for anything in
particular in the notebooks. I think for a moment. What I say is, “I’m not sure yet,” because how
can you tell someone that you’ve come looking for peace of mind surrounded by an accounting
of the dead? “I suppose,” I tell them, “I’ll know it when I see it.”
I make a list of all the things that my Grandma Jack got to see during her lifetime. It goes
on and on. So much so that I am jealous. Penicillin. The stock market crash. The Great
Depression. Pearl Harbor. Hitler. Mengele. Oppenheimer. “Little Boy.” “Fat Boy.” Hiroshima.
Auschwitz. Jesse Owens. Emmett Till. Medgar Evers. Jonas Salk. The Korean War. Seatbelts.
The rise of television. The Shape of Jazz to Come. Technicolor. Lenny Bruce. Frank Lloyd
Wright. Le Corbusier. Velcro. A man on the moon. Apollo 13. Rachel Carson. Pele. Jackie
Robinson. The age of assassination. The Summer of Love. Woodstock. Vietnam. The microwave.
Charles Manson. The Son of Sam. James Baldwin. Thelonious Monk. The Beatles. Spartacus.
Chuck Yeager. Sean Connery. Liz Taylor. Marilyn Monroe. Aretha Franklin. Betty Friedan. Billy
Jean King. The pill. Crack/cocaine. Three strikes. Hank Aaron. Jim Brown. The Steel Curtain.
The Iron Curtain. The Cuban Missile Crisis. Iran-Contra. The Thrilla in Manila. The Miracle on
Ice. Watergate. Richard Pryor. Andy Warhol. Jean-Michel Basquiat. Muffs. The Velvet
Underground. Televangelism. Roe v. Wade. The Challenger explosion. The computer. The
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cordless phone. Answering machines. Pagers. The fax machine. Overnight shipping. Delivery
pizza. Cable TV . Chernobyl. The Berlin Wall. The fall of the Berlin Wall. Pink Floyd. Run
DMC. HIV . AIDS. Jeffery Dahmer. The landing strip. The Prince Albert. Tribal tattoos. Miller
Lite. Miller Genuine Draft. Zima. Crystal Clear Pepsi. Michael Jackson. Princess Diana. John
Bobbitt. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Nintendo. Super Nintendo. Sega Genesis. Nirvana.
Michael Jordan. Wayne Gretzky. CNN. Dolly. Rodney King. Reginald Denny. Orenthal James
Simpson. Kato Kalin. The Honorable Judge Lance Ito. Mass graves.
But I am struck just as much by the things my Grandma Jack never saw but would have
wanted to:
Me graduate high school.
Me graduate college.
Me get married.
Me have children.
In other words: Alfred Brown V .
Dark Sun:
Almost all of Athas is a desert wasteland, but that does not mean that the landscape is
monotonous. Far from it; over each hill, behind each dune, the terrain is more awesome,
more spectacular, more beautiful than what you have already seen. In my travels, I have
been overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of this land, cowed by its indifferent brutality,
even overpowered by the unrestrained might of its elements, but never have I been bored.
!221
I would like always to remember the magic of seeing “Athas” printed there in the middle
of that rectangular, overtly European city limits sign.

It was magic that derived in large part from the 3,653 miles separating me from the
ATHAS STOMPER back in Morningside Heights, the ATHAS STOMPER that had brought me to this
European village in the first place. To be so near and far at the same time felt like fruition. Like I
was reuniting long lost twins. The view didn’t hurt, either. The Pyrenees rose out of the ground in
!222
Figure 30
every direction, thick, lush mountains carpeted with dense, dark green foliage that were capped
by jagged cliffs, boulders, and outcroppings. The scenery here required adjectives like immense
and staggering and nouns like grandeur. Sentences like: Just look at the staggering grandeur of
these immense mountaintops… This was a valley through which Napoleon marched soldiers.
Slopes down which alpine skiers tumbled to their death. But now, in the gentle breeze of
summer, it was a detonation of the natural world. All sky and earth and air, slung through with a
placid stream like a zipper. I was driving the rental car north on a small one-lane country road
trying to gawk without crashing. To the right, the pastures dropped off from the land, and a small
cluster of rustic buildings flitted by me on the left. I had come to the Valle d’Aspe, a 25-mile
enclave of the Béarnaise region in the far south of France, to see with my own two eyes one of
its thirteen hamlets that just so happened to share its name with the sidewalk inscription that had
eclipsed my every waking thought. Extensive research and cartographical scrutiny suggested that
this Athas was the only of its kind—the only geographic location in the entire world officially
dubbed “Athas.” I had come to see if there might be any connection between Athas and ATHAS
STOMPER, to see if one might have influenced or could take credit for the other. I had feared for
some time before my arrival that the town might have sabotaged its connection to the sidewalk
by linking its nomenclature to Leés, a town some scant kilometers away, with the dash I kept
seeing on every map. The quaint, romantic narrative that I had built up in my head required
“Leés-Athas” to connote “Leés and also Athas” and not some wonky European geo-social
amalgam of the two. Driving now towards its city limits and seeing the telltale disparity in font
sizes told me everything was good and right: I was leaving the diminutive LEÉS and now
entering the large, caps-locked ATHAS.
!223
I had no agenda. I had made no contacts. Apart from an accent-heavy suggestion to climb
one of the nearby mountains made by the elderly couple that ran the Chez Michel chambers
d’hôtes bed and breakfast in nearby Bedous, I was left completely to my own devices. To
describe what I was hunting—a truth? an answer? some sort of sign?—is to miss the point
entirely. Some sad folks spend their whole life looking for God. Quaint. Romantic. Etc. I felt
much more like a conduit than a sleuth. Like a handshake in human form. A bridge of map.
Many Christmases had past since last I felt the way I did driving into Athas, and I wanted to
savor it. I drove slow. Saw a total of no living souls. Parked. The towns here all seemed more or
less the same scattershot attempt at sprinkling roughly-hewn homesteads around a dilapidated
town square, though to give it that much official distinction would be misleading. At best, Athas
was a less than one hundred homes large, some five, maybe six small cobbled roads slung
awkwardly onto the lower hillside of an increasingly steep mountain. The latest official census,
taken in 2017, recorded 277 total inhabitants, but getting out of my car I saw no evidence of even
one. I did find, however, a sort of centralized bulletin board encased in plexiglass with flyers and
a calendar of events and an amateur attempt at a map. And though it was in French, I was able to
parse my way through one particular set of information that left me reeling:
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!
“The community of Leés Athas brings together two distinct towns situated at an altitude
of more than 430 meters,” it said, I think, more or less. “The topographical dictionary of Béarn
communities (by Michel Grosclaude) indicates that the name ‘Leés’ possibly signifies ‘large slab
of flat stones’ thus referring to the virginal rocks overlooking the town. According to the same
dictionary, the meaning of ‘Athas’ is far more obscure.” To be thwarted was, of course, far more
fulfilling than some long-winded huff-and-puff about virginal rocks. The meaning of Athas, the
meaning of ATHAS STOMPER: these were not simply “obscure,” they were unknowable.
Purposefully so. This was exactly how the world had intended them to be. I walked from the
!225
Figure 31
signage towards the sound of running water and discovered, in a covered public space just
adjacent, a gently babbling spigot put there, I assumed, just like the Croton Aqueduct
Pumphouse, to bring water to the hoi polloi. By now, the doubling and residue had done their
damage. I was impervious to shock. I couldn’t tell if I was inserting greater meaning where there
was none, nor did I care if that happened to be the case. I could hear the voice of reason saying
words like coincidence and clichéd, but my head spun with elegant theses regarding concrete and
water, permanence and impermanence taking their cues from the overarching debate of physical
versus meta- and where to appropriately locate our timid little guts in the melee.

Because the first Athasian woman I saw spoke only French, she took me by the hand and
delivered me down the street to a second Athasian woman named Genevieve. And because
Genevieve, who came out of her garage covered in dust and sweat, spoke mostly French, she
listened to me stumble back and forth between English and Spanish, saw my excitement, and
furrowed her brow while I showed her a picture of ATHAS STOMPER that I had saved on my
phone. She said something about Leés and Athas being two different—but brotherly—villages, I
think, more or less, which of course this was the case, I was glad that she could confirm it, and
then something else about it was certainly possible for someone from Athas to have made ATHAS
STOMPER since many of the second-borns often have no place staying at home in the small town,
she said, or something thereabouts, and added and idea about firstborns do the chore of helping
parents into middle and old age, and usually see to the family business (cheese, farming, etc.)
while the nexts of kin roam and wander, to Paris, to London, maybe to New York, and (like her)
some come back, while some stay gone forever. This is more or less what Genevieve said, but it
!226
was all a Tommy gun of language spewing from a jolly woman with frazzled red hair who I had
only just met and was talking to on the side of the road, and so when she saw that I couldn’t keep
up with her, she snorted out of her nose and took me by the hand, too, and walked me up the
street to a cottage with a 180-degree vista of the entire Valle d’Aspe and handed me off to a man
named Jean Bourdaa. “Thank you,” I said, fielding the kisses she unconsciously delivered to my
cheeks. “Yes, yes” she said, slunging more language back over her shoulder to Jean Bourdaa as
she walked away, scolding him it seemed, and he listened to her while nodding at me and told me
to come in.
Jean Bourdaa sits me at his dinner table and makes me pasta with whole tomatoes and
olive oil and salt. We speak briefly in Spanish, but when I show him ATHAS STOMPER, he gets
excited and switches immediately to English. “Where is this?” he says, taking my phone from
my hands. He asks me to show him on a map. He begins telling me all about the Ligue of Henry
IV , a club-like diaspora of Béarnaise people across the world. “This could be your Athas!” he
says. He logs onto the internet and begins doing different searches. He picks up the phone and
calls various friends. They speak loudly and quickly and in French, and he doesn’t translate for
me. His internet goes in and out of service. His phone goes in and out of service. He sighs. He
asks me if I will take cheese and wine, and when I declined he shrugs and says, “You come all
the way to France and skip the best things we have to offer.” He tells me that I was like his father
who has an extensive wine cellar, but only “for guests. He never drinks, either.” He points out the
slats of wood in the house, how when he and his father built it in 1985 they had gone to great
lengths to use small, well-concealed nails so you couldn’t see them. “I can see them,” he says
!227
with pride, “but that is because I built it.” This is before he is ever made the mayor of Athas.
Before he is the mayor of Athas for nine straight years. He grills a clove of garlic and places it on
the pasta with a dash of salt. “Bon appetite,” he says, but he is saying it as a joke. I laugh. He
tells me he has to keep the door shut so flies won’t come in, but there is also a sticky fly strip
hanging in the kitchen slathered with carcasses anyway. And I do not want to forget his laundry
hanging on the line, his three pairs of underwear, nor how he had to search for the word “ex-“ in
English to attached to his former wife when he speaks about her. His house is considerably
disheveled for a middle-aged man who is the superintendent or principal (I cannot make out the
nuance of the French school system) of two Basque Lycées. I imagine his two children having to
help him clean every time they come over, groaning and moaning, but also maybe feeling sorry
for him. It is so beautiful where Jean Bourdaa lives, but so lonely. He tells me all about the trip
he takes to America in 1994 after finishing university in Montreal where he drove a small
V olkswagen to San Francisco to stay with a Béarnaise cousin. He had no money back then, he
told me, since he was a student, and so he brought a tent and looked for campsites along the way.
He was struck by the close-mindedness of people in a suburb of Chicago. And he extolled the
virtues of California, which, for him, was something distinctly separate from the rest of the
United States. “It is by itself,” he says to me, to make his point. He is adamant about showing me
videos on the internet from the Ligue of Henry IV . Meetings and barbecues. He tells me that he
will make more calls, that this ATHAS STOMPER must have something to do with the Béarnaise
people, how the Béarnaise people are all the time moving away from Béarn because there are no
jobs and it is poor in money even if it is rich in mountains. If I have not climbed Pic d’Anie, that
is something I should do, he says, because it is very beautiful. “But nobody stays,” he says,
!228
“because something is beautiful. People stay because they are rich.” His children, he says, are far
away in Lyon. He sees them sometimes in the summer, but mostly they are with their mother in
Lyon. “They like it there,” he says, “Lyon is a beautiful city.” And to cheer him up, I tell him
more about ATHAS STOMPER. I tell hm that I will write a book about ATHAS STOMPER and I will
call it Concrete Flag because that is what the workers in New York call the slabs of sidewalk—
concrete flags. He smiles and says that he would like to play himself in the movie. And he says
that he will teach the dog—“I will teach Roche how to act, too!” he says. “Okay!” I say, and
shake his hand. It feels like we are making a movie deal. It feels like we are moguls. Before I
leave, I ask Jean Bourdaa if I can take a picture of him. He stands outside in his yard where his
underwear is being tossed by the breeze and where he has chopped so much wood that it is
stacked to the roof of his house. And I can see Jean Bourdaa and I sitting on his porch in the
future with a copy of Concrete Flag he’s translated into French held loosely in his hands and his
dog, Roche, barking at a butterfly in the distance. I tell him that maybe one day I will move to
Athas myself and build a small house to live in with nails so small no one will be able to know
where they are except me. I tell him that maybe people will read Concrete Flag and go to New
York to see ATHAS STOMPER and then they will travel on a plane to see this Athas, too, and who
knows, maybe they will bring money and they will buy cheese and they will buy wine. Of
course, Concrete Flag will be written in a fever, poorly articulating the splay of sensations I feel
when I begin to follow the Roman alphabet around the world in search of a troublemaking kid
binged on D&D and find instead the limp tube socks of a stubborn Athasian, his people clustered
into this Aspe Valley, their little lives crowded out by the grand spectacle of all these teetering
mountaintops.
!229

The Human Condition requires tube socks. The Human Condition requires brain freeze.
The Human Condition requires hypoxia, endometriosis, mesothelioma, sickle cell anemia,
cyanide, citizen’s arrest. The Human Condition requires many cloves of garlic.
Tareyton Williams will be released from prison in five years. And counting.
Robert Williams will be released from prison in 410 years. And counting.
Days later, we are all cleaning out Alfred Brown II’s Jersey City apartment—Alfred
Brown IV , Alfred Brown III, and his brother (my uncle), Jerry. We each retire to different areas
!230
Figure 32
Figure 23
of the apartment, trying to find any goods worth salvaging, any heirlooms worth holding on to. I
opt to undertake the closet. Coats, newspapers, a few pairs of old sneakers, a trove of now-
vintage pornography. Some time later, we find ourselves congregating in the kitchen. “Did you
know he was on Viagra?” says my Uncle Jerry, slamming down a bottle of pills. “Did you know
he had a thing for coeds?” I say, sliding the boxset of Girls Gone Wild VHS tapes onto the
counter. Somebody thinks about making a joke, but doesn’t. We throw almost everything away in
large black trash bags. The hallway smells like urine and borscht. I keep a one of the VHS tapes.
Actually, I keep two. It is my only inheritance.
Later, at the funeral, it is the first time I see my father cry. And last. Quaint. Romantic.
Etc.
And yet.
Somewhere back in California, my Grandma Jack continues to breathe for two more
years. A team of nurses force-feed soft foods into a mouth they must pry open for access. “Good
girl, Jackie,” they say. I can’t tell, no matter how I spin it, who gets the last laugh.
I would like to find some way to make my Grandma Jack the hero of this book. I would
like you to see her as I do, screaming and half naked, because, honestly, fuck the decorum we’ve
inherited. I am an animal and her instincts knew better than the right to remain silent. Because if
we are allowed to venerate the cake-bakers of this world, we better damn well place on a golden
!231
pedestal the banshees. The shrill. The Medusas. My grandmother was a harbinger. A portent. An
oh, come, all ye faithful. A beware all ye who enter here. I hear her still like a screech of brakes
at the turn of the century. Like a human skid mark. An emergency ejection button at the edge of
the western world. She was there to warn us all, maternal in that wooden spoon type of way. She
saw the cliff we were sprinting towards and moved in to flat tire our reckless abandon. She was a
parachute in paradise. The ripcord we forewent. The police, when they arrived, questioned me
for what seemed like forever while they wrapped a large wool blanket around my grandmother
and sat her down on the porch. “When was the last time your grandmother had one of these
breakdowns?” they wanted to know. “How many times has she had an episode like this?” Those
quaint, romantic words we use to distance ourselves from crazy—“breakdown,” “episode.” I
think if she could have done it again, she would have modulated only the frequency and the
amplitude. Leaned a bit deeper into both hell and high water. Because maybe all this is is a
restitution. My attempt to snag back the body of Jackie Brown from the mass grave in which we
keep having to place all these women we like to call victims. Maybe this is me trying to dust off
the pedestal she deserves. To hand her back the megaphone. I ask her children simple questions
about her life and they do not know the answers. “When was the last time your mother had one
of these breakdowns?” I say. “How many times has she had an episode like this?” They respond
by saying things like, “I don’t know.” By saying things like, “I can’t remember.” I’m convinced
now that these are the sorts of thing we can no longer say. I’m convinced that this is no longer
good enough. That this is not how we should respond in the face of overwhelming odds. Because
the last time I saw my Grandma Jack I was still a teenager. This was a year, maybe two after she
had imploded. I sat there and stared. She sat there and stared off. I wanted very badly to believe
!232
that it mattered I was there in that room with her, eating the ice chips out of her bowl. I wanted
very badly to believe I made some sort of difference. I said some things to her, just in case she
could hear me, just in case it might help, but I know now that I should have been listening
instead. Because even there in that wheelchair, slumped and crumpled, she was roaring. Even
then, swam full of meds, under the weight of all that gravity, she was screaming at the top of her
lungs. What does it say about me that I chose not listen? What does it say that she lived for eight
more years, but I never again saw her alive? This was my choice. To leave her to die. To leave
her to die alone. There is an entire generation of women to whom we offered the urn before the
pedestal. A mass grave of the dead who I want so badly to resurrect. I think often about that
patch of Camden earth that Jack now calls her home. She’s a stone’s throw from Whitman, where
year round there are wreaths, where year round there are flowers. But my grandmother will
disappear into obscurity. Without even her maiden name intact. But if I am quiet, I may still hear
her talk. And if I listen hard enough, she may yet find her voice.
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Figure 33
I track down the last known address of KISS Construction N.Y . INC. who, according to
the documentation provided to me by Dino Ng at the Department of Transportation Sidewalks
Division, repaired the sidewalk on Amsterdam Avenue from West 118
th
Street to West 119
th

Street between June 3, 2003 and June 17, 2003, approximately two years before I moved to the
neighborhood. I take the B49 bus to the J train, the J train to 111
th
Street stop (after having to
back track from Lorimer to Myrtle because of repairs to the track). This is in Richmond Hill, in
Queens, near a cluster of businesses: a bodega; a real estate agency called A Better World; a row
of construction office fronts (none of them KISS Construction). When I get to the address listed
for KISS Construction N.Y . INC, it is a regular-looking New York City home. Two stories, with
an A-frame structure on the second floor. There is a black SUV in the driveway and also a yellow
SUV that seems to be an official city taxicab. A metal sign next to front door explains that the
house is under surveillance, no trespassing, etc. It is not exactly the sort of spirit I associate with
ATHAS STOMPER. But. And yet. Still. I gather my courage and knock. I wait. There is no bell to
ring. I hear nothing. So I knock one more time. I wait. I contemplate what I will say to ATHAS
STOMPER when ATHAS STOMPER opens the door. The options seem limited. I can’t say, “Hi. Are
you ATHAS STOMPER?” Even supposing it is ATHAS STOMPER, there is very little chance they’ll
open up and admit to it. After more than a decade, there’s very little chance they’ll even
remember what ATHAS STOMPER is. And even if they do remember who/what/where ATHAS
STOMPER is, a stranger asking about ATHAS STOMPER more than a decade after they inscribed
ATHAS STOMPER into a flag of Morningside Heights concrete would be highly suspicious. They
!234
would not admit to being ATHAS STOMPER even if they were ATHAS STOMPER if when they open
the door I start straight in with, “Hi. Are you ATHAS STOMPER?” All of which begins to make me
feel like knocking is a bad idea. Like knocking is a dead end. Like sometimes we are better off
not knowing. Like sometimes we are better off in the dark.
The woman that answers the door is old. I can see the wrinkle pulsed in her skin through
the screen and the small crack she makes with the door. Her eyes are green and tired. A small
black mustache has sprouted from her upper lip. “What do you want?” she says, appropriately,
suspicious. I take a breath. “I’m sorry to bother you, ma’am,” I say, but she cuts me off. “I said,
what do you want?” I close-mouth smile. “Would you happen to know, ma’am,” I said, “if this is
KISS Construction?” I could hear a child snickering somewhere in the background at something
that sounded like a television. “Kiss?” she said, incredulously, scoffing. “No, honey, I’m sorry.
There’s no kiss anything here.” She starts to close the door. I barge my voice back through before
it snaps shut. “What about an Athas?” I said. “Do you know and Athas Stomper?” The door hung
for a moment, then pushed an inch back open. She cocked her head to the side. The television
was playing reruns of Roadrunner and Coyote. I caught a snippet of anvil falling from sky from
the extended crack in the door. A small girl was sitting Indian style on the floor, a bucket of
popcorn in her lap. “Honey,” she said, “are you okay? Do you need some help?” I smirked. For a
moment we hovered in gaze. The little girl laughed. “Grandma, come here!” she said. “Hurry up,
it’s funny!” I nodded to the woman. She looked confused. Rightfully. I turned, left.
I have been searching in vain for ATHAS STOMPER now for over a decade. More? More.
!235
This is no exaggeration.
In most ways I am not now any closer than when I began to knowing who ATHAS
STOMPER is. Or even: what. Where? Etc.
At this point, I have concocted so many competing stories about ATHAS STOMPER that I
am uncertain which one to believe. If any.
Sometimes it occurs to me that, in fact, everything I know about ATHAS STOMPER is, in its
own way, true. That is, real. Insofar as real is something still (these days) possible.
For instance, ATHAS STOMPER played football for the New York Giants.
For instance, ATHAS STOMPER was an Augustinian priory built at the start of the 13th
century at a picturesque bend in central Ireland’s River Suir by the fierce Norman conquerer
William de Burgh.
For instance, ATHAS STOMPER was a brand of toy car particularly popular in the
late-1960s and early-1970s.
This is true, all of it, and real.
!236
When I am discouraged, it is because it has become obvious that I may never know with
certainty who or what or where ATHAS STOMPER really is. Was? Will be? Etc.
But when I am most happy, it is this way, too. When everything is anything I want it to
be.
!237
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Asset Metadata

Creator Brown, Alfred Eugene Joseph (iv)

Core Title In defense of “prose”; and, Concrete flag

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Literature and Creative Writing

Publication Date 11/04/2020

Defense Date 08/28/2020

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Amy Hempel,Athas Stomper,Concrete,Daniel Defoe,David Markson,Donald Barthelme,estuarial literature,Fiction,hybrid literature,literary genre,Morningside Heights,New York City,non-fiction,not-knowing,OAI-PMH Harvest,reality,Robinson Crusoe,Sophie Calle,The Harvest,W.G. Sebald

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Bender, Aimee (committee chair), Anderson, Emily (committee member), Everett, Percival (committee member), Gustafson, Thomas (committee member), Saks, Elyn (committee member)

Creator Email alfredbr@usc.edu,alfredbrowniv@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-390641

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Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA