Autumnal

It is Atlanta, late October 2009. He is on the corner of Peachtree circle and 17th street, in front of his godparents’ house. The air is crisp, and so I need not tell you the leaves are burnt. The trees are weightless, the trunks non-existent, the branches invisible. The light is simultaneously bright and soft, as in a fading polaroid.

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The structure of an essay is the logic of a dream.

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A holiday weekend in Amherst, Massachusetts, 2014. The students have fled, turning the campus into a ruin. Across the valley, trees are changing. You might insert your favorite metaphor for autumn leaves. No matter how you phrase it, they are dying. The air is chilly, nippy, spry. The sun is casting a cinematic grain upon the world.

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To the German philosopher Walter Benjamin, coziness was related to bourgeois imperialism. The homes he grew up in were upper-middle-class apartments, chock-full of tchotchkes, rugs, art, and other trinkets imported from German Africa. One could not run, stretch, or think without breaking something, bringing down the bourgeois father’s wrath. In contrast, Bauhaus, with its open spaces and minimalism, offered bare living, producing freedom and training for life in modernity.

A century later, no self-respecting member of the bourgeois—if such a class still exists—would dare live in the type of home Benjamin loathed. Minimalism is the default choice. Not the minimalism of Bauhaus, but one influenced by mid-century modernism and Scandinavia. Tour any home priced above a million or so and you’ll encounter kitchens covered in white marble, spidered with tasteful veins of grey, farmhouse sinks, tan wood cabinets—usually with a grey undertone—white walls, and the lightest of brown wood floors, and wrought-iron window frames opening to a small yard featuring artificial turf. All the little objects that hold signs of life—soup ladles and remotes, corkscrews and holiday cards—are hidden behind the wooden veneer. There is no revelation in these buildings. Even if we acknowledge this isn’t true minimalism, not the bare living Benjamin dreamed of, it nonetheless demands an accounting of what happened.

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October 2004. He is young; second grade has just begun. Sam S. is standing to his left, pear-shaped, his hair cut close. Quincy W. is on his right. They are all wearing Brown Merrells and khaki pants and blue collared shirts and fleeces, the latter two emblazoned with the Woodward Academy crest. It is one of those autumn mornings where there should be frost on the cars, whether it is above freezing or not. Sam is arguing for him to support Georgia Tech football, Quincy the University of Georgia (bizarre, considering his allegiance to the University of Michigan). The light is flat, the sun diffused in the grey above us. There is a single brick wall behind them. Besides that, the world is absent, unseen.

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These images exist as frames excised from a lost film; there is the feeling of movement, the blurred edges you get when you isolate a single shot from the rest, but I cannot see said movement. There is context around them (I was getting coffee for my sister and her friends, visiting Amherst to look at universities, learning for the first time about college football), except it is not in the image, but rather in the inaccessible film. The information holds the same valence as something I read on Wikipedia, not something I experienced. They are images without information—though isn’t this the case with every isolated frame?

I do not see myself in these memories, and yet it is not that I am absent. Rather, it is as though I am the film camera, the producer and center of these images, and yet invisible. Or perhaps not a camera, for at times it is as though I am in the frame, but cannot be seen, a blurred-out lacuna. And like every lacuna, everything visible is nothing more than a commentary on the unseeable object. My affect suffuses the image, and as a result, I disappear, becoming the image. Indeed, I might say that the image is nothing more than a production of my affect.

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Autumnal folklore tends to be set in small towns on the edges of industrialization. Sleepy Hollow might have sat in “listless repose,” operating under a “drowsy, dreamy influence,” but the Hudson River Valley in which it reclined was soon to become the site of intense industrialization. We might note that construction on the Erie Canal—which allowed the transformation of the Hudson River Valley—began in 1817, two years before Irving wrote his enduring short story. Or that British use of Hessian auxiliaries—symbolized through Irving’s headless Hessian—allowed Hessel-Kassel, to build a prosperous textile industry. In the decades after Irving’s tale was published, Hesse would become one of Germany’s industrial centers. The terror lurking in his story, the reason it resonated for so long after, is that we were becoming headless horsemen, bodies and nothing more, alone and atomized yet without subjectivity. That’d we would have the worst of both worlds, the loneliness of bourgeois capitalism and the unfreedom of its industrial successor.

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In academic jargon, affect is understood as a sort of “free-floating intensity,” one that precedes thought. This is what distinguishes it from emotion, and, for affect theorists, frees it from politics, history, and culture. For them, it is never ideological. That they base this on a flawed understanding of science is not relevant to us here. Rather, it is enough to say that the world precedes us, and so precedes even the affective response, conditioning it.

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Coziness, or rather the desire for it, is the desire for a past where (some) people felt themselves to be subjects, and the world was built around such subjects. In this, it is reactionary, an inherently conservative affect. It should not surprise us that autumnal aesthetics are coded as white, and very often upper-middle-class or above. At the same time, such a desire reminds us that there are alternatives, that we need not live in a world built for none of us. In picking apples, we glimpse a world scaled to the individual.

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After 2008, fall aesthetics became particularly dominant. The music and fashion of the time were intensely autumnal, whether in the grey beaches of the Neighborhood, the tweed and twee Lumineers, or the ubiquity of flannel. As the economy flamed out spectacularly, the truth of financialization was laid bare—that it was nothing more than a rear-guard action to salvage an economic system reaching its limits, that there was no future to be found—Millennials found themselves dreaming of alternatives. Occupy Wall Street was the most literal expression of this longing, but was doomed, for it was defined by what it opposed, relied on the old modes for its power. Autumnal aesthetics attempted to sidestep this issue by recalling an arcadian pre-industrial era. At the same time, Steampunk was on the rise. It returned to early industrialization—the moment of the fall in this ideological construction—and imagined it played out differently, that we could have built a system that would never enter crisis, where industry remained dominant. The fashion of the era reflected the paucity of alternatives; all that was on offer was an Edenic past that never existed, or a more functional form of capitalism. Yet there was something else at play in the autumn styles, the oxblood slacks and burnt pumpkin sweaters. In the 2013 remake of Sleepy Hollow, the reawakening of Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman are signs of the apocalypse, that the world is ending.

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The desire for fall is a desire for contentment in the face of death. It is the hope of late-life reconciliation, the opposite of Adorno and Said’s late style. The leaves are dead, the air is smokey, the end is nigh. And yet we are happy, even enjoying the apocalypse, not hiding out hoping for survival, but taking walks and holding parties. The coziness of fall is the unconscious hope that when we die, it will be next to a roaring fire, surrounded by friends and family, not in a fluorescently lit room, violently fighting the coming darkness. In the original version of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” Ichabod Crane is obsessed with ghost stories.  Living in the dreamy, content world of the glade, Crane fixates on death. In the end, what drives him out is not a romantic rival playing tricks on him, but the unconscious realization that the coziness is a façade, that there is no reconciliation with death. The peace of finality is a passing dream.

A Prayer for the Future

May the filth be washed from our land, may the Christian Nationalists understand the hate in our hearts. May the rotten, melting carcasses that bloviate and lie to our faces be pushed out of the halls of power, and may their castles be detonated. May they sleep on the streets; may they experience the derision they reserve for others. Or let them be confined to their decaying Fairfax mansions and Arlington lawns, wandering the empty corridors, taking no solace in their kitschy Steve Penleys. Let the land they live on be as fallow as their souls.

Turn them away from the doors of the church; when they die of old age, deny them salvation.  May they wake up in a world they do not recognize, as they have done to us. Offer them no compassion, no empathy. They deny our common humanity, that which makes such kindness possible. May their ghastliness be known for an eternity, their visages turned into the screeching monsters we use to frighten our young. They desire a world without society; let them experience this. I pray they shall never again sit peacefully at a restaurant, dining on the heart of our nation, never again go on a Sunday stroll with their lovers. May their families abandon them; may their sons and daughters spit on their grave and their grandchildren recoil at their odiousness. May they die terrified and alone, having driven away all in their life, so they must face the trials of judgement unaccompanied.

May they know the suffering of exile, even if they never leave these lands. There is no greater punishment than being expelled from one’s community. May they understand this on a visceral level. In banishment, one can occasionally forget one’s lot, taken in by the beauty of a new home. Let there be no such balm be available to them. May they be trapped in a hell of their own making.

This is not a prayer for violence, but for peace, the peace of a just world.

Snowed In

Rumors are swirling that Quebec will soon begin a new lockdown. What is left to be closed, one might ask. Starting in October, restaurants could only do takeout and delivery, bars closed, and people were asked to not gather in groups. We were promised that this was temporary, a provision that would allow us to see our families at Christmas (well, some of us. Emigres like myself have been asked not to travel). This was, it turns out, a lie. As Christmas approached, public health authorities told us we hadn’t been good boys and girls, and were being punished for our intransigence. Not only could we not gather for Christmas, but further lockdowns would begin starting that merry day. Schools, stores, and the like would close. Only essential businesses would stay open. And construction, of course. We couldn’t risk property developers losing money. There is nothing more essential to a functioning state than empty apartments. That, it seemed, didn’t slow the spread either. So now construction will mercifully stop. There’s also rumor that a curfew will be imposed. What exactly a curfew will change is anyone’s guess. Bars and restaurants can’t serve guests and house parties are verboten. Unless covid is secretly spread through solitary midnight walks, I cannot comprehend how this will help things. Especially since, as the government admits, there is extreme “lockdown fatigue”; it turns out you cannot ask people to only associate with two other people for months on end without any changes to the situation. It does, however, contribute to the government’s narrative that irresponsible young people are causing the spike, with our refusal to seal ourselves in cement until everything is over. Never mind that schools were the main spreaders for this second wave, because the government absolutely fucking botched their reopenings. Or that long term care facilities make up almost the rest of the outbreaks. Admitting this would mean the government fucked up, not the people. And god forbid we cast aspersions on the government.

I admit this all sounds bitter, like something an anti-lockdown conservative or maskless idiot might say. Certainly, there are individuals acting carelessly; someone I went to high school with regularly posts photos from maskless club nights and boat parties. But for the most part, people take precautions seriously. I have yet to see anyone under fifty maskless indoors (I have, on the other hand, seen plenty of “responsible” middle-aged people wearing them around their chins). As I wrote on Twitter, my generation (23-35) has sacrificed a year of our dwindling youth to save a generation that has left us a fucked economy, a destroyed environment, and a toxic political system. And we would do so again, because it was the right thing to do. But it is worth acknowledging that it was not easy. We did this despite being significantly worse equipped for a lockdown than older generations. We are less likely to be married, less likely to have homes, less likely to be surrounded by greenspace. Over the past decade, we have moved into small apartments in more industrial areas, since this was a) what was affordable and b) where things were happening. Now, nothing is happening, and we are stuck in those “sheetrocked boxes [we] increasingly call home” which “somehow feel both dead and new,” staring at whitewashed walls and billowing smokestacks. This, as one might imagine, is terrible for one’s mental health, explaining why nearly 50% of Quebec’s university students are now experiencing anxiety or depression. In the U.S., 64% of the 18-24 demographic has anxiety or depression. For “my” cohort (though technically in the 18-24, most of my friends are older), it’s a measly 40.4%. For those between 44-65, it drops to 20% and then 8% among those above 65.

And yet, despite this, the New York Times runs op-eds about how selfish we are, how terrible it is for 88-year-olds to be stuck in their rooms. Certainly it is. I cannot express how awful I feel for my grandparents, trapped in their apartment above Atlanta, lonely and isolated. Old age is supposed to be when you are surrounded by those you love, grandchildren hugging you as your sons and daughters help with whatever is necessary. I do not wish to sound callous about their struggles. But there is something deeply offensive about articles where octogenarians declare that “because of [young people], I’m stuck in my room.” No. You are stuck because of a deadly pandemic that unfairly and disproportionately effects the elderly. We, the supposedly carefree and reckless youth, on the other hand, are stuck in our rooms because of you, because we care enough about the health of an older generation that we are willing to live like ascetics. If we are all in a lonely place, it is not because one generation or another has been particularly self-absorbed, but because governments across North America have been incompetent at best and malicious at worst, exposing us to the ravages not only of the virus, but a rapacious capitalism that cares not a whit for anyone’s well-being. Media narratives may try and tell us otherwise, but the story of covid is not that of the young failing the old, but the system failing us all.

Against Peer Review

Those employed in intellectual fields today live in contradiction: most of academia exists in opposition to the values of academics.[1] Many of these issues—the financialization of the academy, the adjunctification of the labor market, the rise of legions of deans and other administrators, the refusal of the NCAA to pay athletes, so the academic is laboring for an organization that is actively oppressing others—cannot be addressed except for through organized collective action.

But, at least within the humanities, there is one universal dislike that could be addressed: the creeping sciencification of the liberal arts. Admittedly, part of this sciencification is part and parcel of the rise of the administrative class within the academy, related to the move away from what David Graeber refers to as the guild mode of governance, where those who do a job organize and manage themselves, and so will also require collective action. The clearest example of this type of sciencification is the research proposal, an exercise in stupidity anyone who has pursued an advanced degree has encountered. In theory, the proposal should be relatively inoffensive. Part of writing a good essay is knowing what question you’re asking. But in modern academia, this is not enough. You need to have the answer before you write. But of course, this is impossible. The argument of a humanities paper is the paper itself. The answer to the research question cannot be hypothesized beforehand, like in the sciences. It emerges from the construction of the essay, from the transformation of research into words. Adorno recognized this sixty years ago, and the post-structuralists reaffirmed it.

         Relatedly, the proposals will ask for the methodology of the paper. Again, this is natural in the sciences, but should be foreign to the liberal arts (that it is accepted in so many subfields should force us to reconsider their value). Humanities papers are narratives at heart—when analyzing a novel or film or artwork, you are telling a “just so” story about it. To decide the structure of a narrative before understanding its content is to betray the tale you are trying to tell. For the liberal arts, methodology should be thus: one researches, and then one writes. To decide in advance what tools you will need is to abandon your job. As an aside, this is why I’m skeptical of attempts to draw a strong line between academic and literary non-fiction; as Tom Bissell notes literary non-fiction writers are those who attempt to reveal truth through the “force of their argument and their use of detail.” Academics do much the same; the difference is that the academic is constantly rethinking the very concept of truth as they try to find it.

         Because the research proposal is imposed by the administrative class, however, it is not what I want to discuss; to address it would require collective action. Instead, I want to look at what I think is a self-imposed sciencification of the liberal arts: namely, the rise of peer-review, and the accompanying insistence that academic essays should not take risk. I should clarify here that I am not against the principles behind peer-review; essays absolutely should be vetted before publishing, checked for obvious errors and failures. But in the liberal arts, this was traditionally done by friends and colleagues (for the latter category), and editors who caught any clear errors. In this system, individuality was allowed to flourish, at least to some extent. Adorno has caught lots of criticism over the years for his critique of Benjamin’s essays (some valid, some less so) but he never attempted to make Benjamin’s writing “normal,” to strip it of unacademic and risky aspects. It was critique, but it was not homogenizing, because he knew the author and recognized that protecting voice was important.

         Modern peer review, on the other hand, is adapted from science and hence relies on anonymity, a relic of the scientific insistence on reproducibility. But no essay is repeatable; as I’ve said, the content is always dependent on its representation. To strip the essay of its author (even while acknowledging that ‘author’ is a construct) is to empty it of one of its dimensions. After all, as Huxley noted, the essay is made up of three poles: the autobiographical, the concrete-factual, and the abstract universal. The anonymity of peer-review removes the first. And the way peer-review operates nowadays removes the third. Any claims about universality will be removed or critiqued, using exceptions to the general. But the great essay uses the concrete-factual to create tension with the abstract universal—only the laziest of writers believe that the universal is always true. The peer-review structure blinds us to this, however. Recently, I was sitting in on a friends’ seminar, where they were studying The Culture Industry chapter of The Dialectic of Enlightenment. The professor noted that such a chapter could not be  published today in any self-respecting philosophy journal—it would never get past peer-review, since it references others’ arguments without adequately summarizing, works across various disciplines and eras, structures itself to be in a non-linear form, instead taking the structure from the content it analyzes, and makes broad, critiqueable claims. Certainly, there are legitimate criticisms of the book, and that chapter in particular. But part of its power is in its failures, in how it forces a response, stimulates thinking, and more. In short, the essay is important not only because of its use of detail, but also due to the “force of its argument”—to use Bissell’s phrase—which points to a general truth and forces us to consider whether it even exists. While I have my problems with the chapter (I prefer Adorno’s later writing on culture, which is more dialectical in my opinion), there is no doubt philosophy, media studies, sociology, and numerous other fields would be much poorer if the work had been submitted to peer review as it exists today.

         The weird thing is that though every single liberal arts academic I have met feels at least somewhat queasy about the dominance of peer-review, the process continues. In the seminar mentioned above, a reoccurring theme across weeks was how few of the important philosophical works of the past two centuries would pass peer-review, and how damaging it was for the field of philosophy.[2] Often times, it is justified as necessary for reducing discrimination and destroying the cliquish nature of academic disciplines; if the reviewer does not know who wrote an essay, they cannot give leeway because they are friends, or punish them for being part of the “out” group. This is frankly bullshit and insults the intelligence of all involved. For one, whoever accepted the submission first knew who it came from. More than this, however, it cannot be “liberatory” or “diversifying” to insist on a singular way of writing, particularly one that is highly affected, as the academic voice is. Anyone not sufficiently coached in the language and tone of the discipline will be punished. And as we have seen again and again, one of the major advantages the privileged class in academia holds is tighter bonds with advisors, who help them navigate the labyrinth of what to say and how to say it. It also emphasizes the faddish aspect of academia; if you do not uncritically use the terminology that is in style, the reviewer can sink the essay.[3] Right now, race, gender, and post-colonial theory are “in.” This is an unalloyed good. But unfortunately, it may not always be this way, and the same structures that support these vital fields will be turned against it. Peer-review is not the friend of liberation.

         So why does it continue? I think there are three reasons. Primarily, it gives the liberal arts a sheen of objectivity, which helps when justifying our existence to administrators, and makes us feel more legitimate. We’re not making theoretical arguments, but rather working from the facts on the ground. But playing neo-liberalism’s game will not save us. The goal of those financializing the academy is to destroy the liberal arts. We should not help them, which means we should not accept their framing or their tools. Secondly, it makes both writing and research easier. An Adorno essay cannot be understood unless you closely read the whole thing, constantly working to understand the relationship of the individual sentence to the whole. With the peer-reviewed essay, however you can closely read the introduction to get a hang of the argument, then skim the rest, looking only at the portions useful for your work. The style will be the same across essays, meaning you don’t have to learn an author’s idiosyncrasies. The meaning of technical phrases remains constant, so you don’t have constantly think about what something means in the context of how it’s used. And it allows greater fragmentation and ease in writing. No longer do you have to make sure that each part relates to the whole essay, but rather to whatever section it is in. You don’t have to double back and reflect on your own claims, constantly taking one step forward and two back, like the “procession of Echternach” Adorno loved to reference. You don’t have to think about how you will structure the essay to reflect content, but instead follow a set path laid out by those before you. It is the difference between following a hiking trail and setting off on your own.[4] And finally, because administrators have done such a good job linking the standardization peer-review produces with some notion of equality, there is a threat that calling for the abandonment of peer-review will be cast as a call for discrimination, that you are “unwoke” for pointing out how this supposedly “liberatory” thing is anything but.

         This leaves us with the classic Marxist question: “What is to be done?” The most obvious action would be for faculty that run academic journals to admit that peer-review is not in anyone’s interest except administrators and refuse to indulge in it. Scrap the entire process. Instead, academics should review and critique each other’s work before it gets submitted anywhere. There should be less fear about criticizing friends and colleagues’ essays, instead understanding that this process is vital to the liberal arts. Disagreement is a site where the best knowledge is produced. Editors should trust their own judgement, as well as that an article that fails in some way will garner responses and not stand on its own. Understand that essays never stand on their own but are part of a larger discourse. Collaboration should be emphasized and the “race to firstness” abandoned. We should acknowledge that research and writing are hard work, that there are no shortcuts to conveying or understanding concepts.[5] And we must loudly reject any attempts on the part of the neoliberal academy to link sciencification to progressivism. Science and its processes are not inherently good or unbiased, as we’ve found time and again. Instead, we should emphasize how this project sets us back, limits us, and hurts those who are already oppressed. We should refuse to abandon our search for truth, and yet also recognize that, per Bissell, if “we learn the truth by comparing the lies, there we stand, liars all,” that a “truthful story that may not cohere exactly to what happened, because what literally happened is not always the best illustration of the truth.” We are writing narratives, not case studies. The very act of doing so is an abandonment of the “truth” of reality, since, as Bissell notes, “stories do not exist until some vessel of consciousness comes along and decides where it begins and ends, what to stress, and what to neglect.” To pretend otherwise is the greatest lie of all.


[1] I should note that I am not in academia; I tend to believe the phrase refers to those enrolled in PhD programs and above. I am not a professor, a PhD candidate, or anything else. Rather, I am a former master’s student planning to apply to PhD’s, with a great many friends in the field. I am writing from the position of someone not quite in and not quite out.

[2] This doesn’t even touch on the fact that the peer-review structure is naturally biased towards analytic philosophy and its desire to be a science.

[3] This essay is not driven by any personal resentment—I haven’t submitted anything to review in over a year.

[4] We might note that when trail-blazing, you are creating something new, but only through the destruction and trampling of a part of nature. The older type of essay is in the same position.

[5] This, in turn, requires collective action to push against the “publish or perish” model. Writing and reading should be a slow, tortuous process.

Memories of the Fall

The air tastes of smoke; crisp days heralding burnt hickory. The mountain is bombarded by its acne, orange pimples on cretaceous rock, preparing to spread once fall is no longer in doubt. The sun has finished its shift—five months on followed by six off—and is taken a well-deserved respite; I hear it escaped down to Florida, ready to spend its vacation wallowing in mud and watching cars pull into The Breakers. “A baby blue Bentley—that’s got to be MJ!”

“His money’s too new and his skin’s too dark for a place like that,” the humidity responds. “Sorry hon, it’s just some old billionaire that considers himself a Dandy.” It’s right, as it always is. That’s the reason it’s so overbearing, why spending too much time around it makes it hard to breathe. It’s what provides its air of inescapability.

Back in Montreal, the moon is taking advantage of an otherwise empty workplace to log some overtime and claim more responsibility. At first it’s worried about being berated, and still waits until seven to show. But as it gets more comfortable, it’ll expand its range until the afternoon is solidly in his purview. You start to feel like you’re in a noir film, existing permanently in the time between when the city wakes up and when its people do, that period when the stores are opening and the metro is half blue-collar workers and half trust-fund clubbers. Or maybe the darkness is more gothic than noir; it refuses to clarify itself. The supermarkets and busses become beacons of light, people going about their business within as they throw reflections onto the rain-slicked streets. It all carries the Schein of Hopper’s Automat, giving the feeling that you’re getting a glimpse into another world, that of the nightdwellers. It’s intoxicating, promising the ecstasy of a new life, except you never truly experience it. No wonder seasonable depression is universal here; when the sun does drag itself into work, it’s only for a few hours, and the rest of the time you feel like an outsider, sitting in darkness observing the lives of others as if you were at the cinema.

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The next day, I go on a walk. Or, rather, I try to. But every smell, every site, every sensation—even just the feel of the breeze—carries with it dozens of memories, turning into signifiers overloaded with referents. I look at Mt. Royal from a distance, and for a millisecond I’m looking at the Black Forest as I wander through Baden-Baden, about to eat breakfast in a room colored a shade of pink so soft that only long-dead royalty would dare use it. But before I can actually remember any of this, the thing—Mt. Royal—pushes back, asserting itself in my vision, loudly insisting on its reality.

Clouds drift across the sky, covering for the sun’s early escape. And suddenly it is October and I’m visiting my sister during her time studying abroad in Ireland. I feel the wet air push across my face, the Irish Sea carried inland. I try to recall a memory of that trip—walking across a Gallway beach or wandering around the tall grass of a Dublin golf course, but doing so chases the experience away, replacing it with an empty thought, one that leaves me unfulfilled. It’s not even just memories of other autumns that overwhelm me. The hickory smoke returns, and I suddenly am in a Colorado winter. But again, when I try to identify the memory provoked, it dissipates into nothingness, the feeling of ecstasy in my chest subsiding, leaving me with an ordinary thought. I try and call back the reverie, but it is gone, lost for good.

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It must be the light, how the sun filters through the atmosphere here, defusing on the way down. Nothing seems to take priority, with the background and foreground merging into one another; the shadows all seem lighter, less secretive. It’s the same soft light found in memories, what gives them their airiness and makes them ungraspable. Berlin has the same light. At least I believe it does. It’s been a while since I’ve been, and there’s always the worry that memory light and remembered light have merged. Flipping through my notebook, I find vindication—a note from the time about the city’s bizarre sun, how it gives every corner a cinematic aura. I’ve arrived at Mt. Royal, finally, but it’s suddenly a park in Pankow, a Berlin suburb. I’m unmoored and disoriented, floating free of space and time. My heart pounds and my breath catches, promising an almost manic joy, but it slips away and I realize that ecstasy is never in the present nor the original experience nor remembrance of it, but rather in its haunting, in those moments where you remember without thinking of the objects, freeing yourself of the materiality, because that’s what holds the guilt within memory; the recognition that in reality you were freezing your ass off simultaneously carries with it acknowledgement of the world’s pain and suffering, its violence and greed, the horror of happiness in a world as degraded and exploitative as our own. The empty reverie holds a memory that extends past your life, past history, a primordial echo of a time when we were one with nature, a point we can never return to but forever yearn for. Adorno once said that true happiness is promised in the childhood understanding of village names like Applesbachville and Wind’s Gap, a pleasure stemming from the promise of once again becoming united with the natural world, except it scrambles away when you arrive, giving you the feeling that you’re too close to the joy to experience it, the physicality of the location foreclosing access. The same thing happens with recollections; the more you remember, the farther the happiness you’re searching for drifts. But despite its escape, you are not disappointed, because you realize that in that memory there is an impulse toward joy, and that perhaps one day this moment will provide that same jolt, as ordinary as it may currently seem. And so I wander through the park, content to drift between weightless reveries and the anticipation of future happiness, haunted by something we’ll never know.

Lies We Choose to Believe*

One of the few times I complimented the South while in the South, I was talking to my mother. I was remarking on the Southern storytelling tradition. What I was saying—probably wondering why such a backward region produced such great storytellers—is less important than my mother’s response. She said that the South is a Romantic culture, a place that believes that stories can evoke more truth than available in the individual words themselves or in what actually happened. In this vein, the South creates a past that may or may not correspond to actual history, but nonetheless lives on in the cultural imaginary. This past, then, only becomes real when it is told or thought, and so the past comes into existence in the present, bearing down on those doing the speaking or thinking. Looking at three of Faulkner’s novels: The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom!, and Light in August, we see the Old South push upon characters in three different ways—as a repressed memory that violently imposes itself on the present, as an ever unfolding line that ensnares those who attempt to unwind it, and as an image that drives the seer into madness. In examining these moments, I hope to understand why the South becomes an obsession for these characters, and work toward an impressionistic answer to the question that has haunted me, and I believe haunts Quentin Compson: How can we hate and love the South at the same time?

To begin with, let us look at Quentin’s portion of The Sound and the Fury. In the novel, the old south is ostensibly dead, or at least on it’s deathbed. Yet nonetheless it presses upon Quentin, making itself real in the present. Events from the past that Quentin is remembering interrupt things that are actually happening in the present—while Quentin is staring at Shreve, Faulkner writes, “he went on, nursing a book, a little shapeless, fatly intent. The street lamps do you think so because one of our forefathers was a governor and three were generals and Mother’s weren’t…Jason I must go away you keep the others I’ll take Jason” (Faulkner The Sound and the Fury 101). As he watches Shreve, the words of his father and mother echo, which then brings to mind a moment from his past until he is back in that moment, the words being remembered as spoken in the present even as they exist in the past. Quentin’s obsession with the past causes it to intrude on the present.

Much of what Quentin remembers his father saying relates to conceptions of virginity, and particularly his sister’s virginity. Still obsessed with the old southern belief that a woman’s worth is defined by her virginity, Quentin tries to tell his father that it was he who slept with Caddie, believing that claiming it could somehow make it true and put him in a special hell with her, where he could protect her. This belief suggests that he sees the past as something malleable, something that can be changed after it has happened as long as it is remembered in a new way. Part of the reason for this is because, as Faulkner’s prose reveals, Quentin experiences the past in the present as vividly as it was in the moment it actually occurred. And part of it is that, ostensibly if one remembers something, then it happened or exists in someway—although this obviously is not actually the case, as individuals remember falsehoods and stories and things that exist only in their minds. However, this is not the entirety of why Quentin believes that the past can be changed in the present, and remembered past can differ from history. To fully grasp why Quentin believes what he believes, we must pivot to two different books, including one in which the Compson clan is absent: Light in August and Absalom, Absalom!.

It is admittedly counter-intuitive to examine a character through a book he is not in. However, it is nonetheless apt. In Light in August, Reverend Gail Hightower is paralyzed by images of his grandfather fighting in the Civil War. His mammie, Cynthie, tells him that his grandfather killed many union soldiers, and even rode into the garrisoned city of Jefferson to conduct a daring raid. The imagery sticks with Hightower, haunting him. He imagines that he is partly his grandfather, and died 20 years before he was born, when his grandfather was shot in Jefferson. This belief shapes his entire life—he works to get posted in the city, and even when he is removed from his position, he continues to live there, even risking his life to stay. The past he is told, the one he dreams of, effects his present, even becoming part of it—at times he speaks of his grandfather’s actions as if they are in the present. Furthermore, he is unable to “get religion and that galloping cavalry and his dead grandfather shot from the galloping horse untangled from each other” (Faulkner Light in August 62). He tells the congregation, and himself, about the noble death of his grandfather, how there was no looting of Jefferson even as it burned. However, as Hightower admits at the end, Cynthie told him his grandfather was “killed in somebody’s else’s henhouse wid a han’full of feathers” (Faulkner Light in August 485). The past he believes is true usurps true history for most of his life, the latter only coming into the reader’s evidence at the end of the novel. Indeed, one could argue that his imagined history is in some ways true, at least in that it was this history that dictates his actions, how he thinks, and how people treat him throughout his life.

However, in true Faulknerian fashion, Hightower’s understanding of his grandfather’s history is not this simple. We know Hightower was told that his grandfather was shot in the henhouse during his childhood, since his mammie told him it. He has kept both pasts in his mind—his father being shot off his horse in the street, and being shot with a shotgun by the wife of the confederate soldier—because for a hero, their “physical passing becomes rumor with a thousand faces before the breath is out of them, lest the paradoxical truth outrage itself” (Faulkner Light in August 484). He says that he believes Cinthy’s story because even if she made it up, “even fact cannot stand with it” (Faulkner Light in August 484). What matters is not which happened, or even what Hightower thinks happened, but what Hightower believes happened, which is both pasts. When talking to the congregation, his grandfather was shot off his horse, but when talking to his wife on the train, his grandfather was shot in the henhouse. Neither death may be accurate, but because he believes both, they both are, in some way. The past is not history, not an accurate representation of what happened, but what people remember happening. Indeed, the same moment in history can have several contradictory pasts.

This, then, starts to offer an understanding of the past that explains Quentin’s belief that if he can claim Caddie’s virginity to his father, then he might be able to protect her in some way after the fact. Hightower lives his entire life believing these two pasts about his father, and hence both become true in some way, shaping his life as well as the lives of those around him. As he says, he is the “debaucher and murderer of my grandson’s wife, since I could neither let my grandson live or die” (Faulkner Light in August 491). His obsessions with these pasts shape not only his life, but also his wife’s and the community’s. Furthermore, these false pasts manifest themselves in the present, overwhelming Hightower, taking control of him and making it so he cannot live his own life, but instead only a life dictated by said pasts.

Unlike Light in August, Quentin is very much present in Absalom, Absalom!. Much of the novel is people recounting the story of Thomas Sutpen to him and vice-versa. He is at the center of this novel that is obsessed with the relationship between history and its retelling as the past. As the novel unfolds, the same story—the rise and fall of Sutpen’s Hundred—is told from several different perspectives. Sutpen’s sister-in-law, Rosa Coldfield, tells Quentin some of it, his father tells him what his father told him, and Quentin and his roommate Shreve discuss it. As this constant talk about the South happens, the dialogue is peppered with “perhaps” and “maybe.” Partly this is because they are talking about the thoughts that other people had, and it is impossible to say for sure what is in someone else’s head. However, it is also because though it is one history they are retelling, it is several pasts.

For example, part of the derailment of the Sutpen dynasty comes when Thomas Sutpen refuses to let his daughter marry Charles Bon, causing Bon and Henry Sutpen, Thomas’ son, to run off. Jason Compson tells Quentin that it was because Charles Bon was Judith’s sister, only for Quentin to learn from Rosa that Charles Bon was part black, and it was this that stopped the marriage—Rosa does not even suspect incest. As the book draws to a close, Quentin and Shreve come to the idea that it was Bon’s black blood that stopped the act of incest from occurring by causing Henry to shoot Bon to stop the marriage. As Bon tells Henry, “so it’s the miscegenation, not the incest, which you can’t bear” (Faulkner Absalom, Absalom! 285). The discussion continues, and Bon taunts Henry that he is not his brother, but “the n****r that’s going to sleep with your sister” (Faulkner Absalom, Absalom 285). The two pasts merge into one, yet still stay as two. To Mr. Compson, incest is the central issue that causes the impasse. To Rosa Coldfield, it is miscegenation. But to Shreve and Quentin, it is both. The pasts imagined by Mr. Compson and Rosa bear down on the boys, pushing them into creating their own past that holds both of these other pasts to be true, regardless of what the historical record says.

From Light in August and Absalom, Absalom!, it has become more clear why Quentin Compson might understand the past as something able to be modified in the present—the past in Faulkner is something separate from history, something linked to memory, community, and the individual and hence constructed in the present and then put onto history from such a vantage point. In such an understanding of the past, it makes sense that Quentin believes that if he is able to claim Caddy’s virginity to his father the claim will somehow become true. However, in doing so we have strayed from the questions that inspired the essay. Let us return to them. In Faulkner, much as in life, the past of the South—how it wants to be remembered, not its actual history—imposes itself on those from there. It is inescapable, pressing constantly upon the mind. Reverend Hightower becomes so obsessed with the death of his grandfather that, as he says, “for fifty years I have not even been clay: I have been a single instant of darkness in which a horse galloped and a gun crashed” (Faulkner Light in August 491). His entire life can be reduced to a single moment not in history, but in the past. Similarly, when Shreve is talking, Faulkner says “he had no listener…then suddenly he had no talker either…because now neither of them was there. They were both in Carolina and the time was forty-six years ago and it was not even four now but compounded still further, since now both of them were Henry Sutpen and both of them were Bon…” (Faulkner Absalom, Absalom! 280). And, as mentioned above, in The Sound and the Fury the prose of the past jumps into the present, interrupting Quentin’s thoughts about where he is to refocus on where he is from.

The South’s past is reliant on memory, and pushes upon those tasked with remembering it. It exists only in the minds of those in the community. Through individuals describing what happened in in the temporal past, the imagined past is created in the present, and then is mapped onto history. The South has to obsess those who carry it with them for its history to live. The implication of this process, however, is that the South’s past is always personal, in that it says something about who created it. This, then, starts to explain why these characters are obsessed with the pasts they and those around them create—it is a way of learning about themselves. And it also starts to explain why it is impossible for Quentin to hate the South, nor not hate it. It is the reason why Absalom, Absalom! concludes with that striking paragraph:

I Dont hate it,” Quentin said quickly, at once, immediately; “I dont hate it,” he said I dont hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark: I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!

(Faulkner Absalom, Absalom 303).

How can one not hate something that tells one about oneself even when one looks outward? And yet how can you despise something of your own creation? For those of us from the South, it is not that the south is part of us, just where we are from, something that can be disavowed and cleanly analyzed. The south is us, for we construct it. There is a dialectical relationship with the South’s past: it consumes and swallows those who live in it and those who try and escape it, yet it is those same people that it consumes that create it.

When I was younger, I could not eat in the rural South. Whether at a Chili’s in Dothan, Alabama or an unnamed barbeque shack in Arapahoe, North Carolina, the smell of food would make me nauseous. If I tried to eat, I would throw up. At the time, I figured it was fear of getting food poisoning. Now, however, I realize that it was a different form of anxiety. I hated these places, hated them with all my heart, hated them as only someone deluding themself can hate. I hated them because though they were ostensibly different from what I was used to, I recognized myself in them. They were from another time, stuck in the past, and whispered that I was no different, that I was equally stuck, no matter how much I fought it. In identifying them as relics, I admitted that I too thought of the South’s past, and I too am unable to escape it. If they are relics, so am I.

The individual in the South, however, does not exist alone. There is always a community around them. If the South’s past is created by individuals remembering the past in the present, and the individuals are part of a community, then it stands to reason that the community has some relationship to the past, complicating the process discussed above. Returning to Faulkner’s novels, both of the characters analyzed above are simultaneously part of the community and outsiders in some way.[2] Reverend Hightower, of course, is a pariah in Jefferson, almost an exile who never left. Quentin leaves the South, putting both literal and metaphorical distance between himself and his community. The act of creating the South’s past falls upon those who are not entirely within the community.[3] If in the creation of a Southern past there are always remnants of the individual doing the creating, then it becomes clear why this is the case. It is a way of re-inserting oneself into the community.

Here, it is important to clarify that though it first appears that Reverend Hightower is made an outsider by his obsession with the past, in fact his outsider status begins much earlier. His father was an old man by the time Hightower was born, and “though born and bred and dwelling in an age and land where to own slaves was less expensive not to own them, he would neither eat food grown and cooked by, nor sleep in a bed prepared by, a negro slave” (Faulkner Light in August 467). He is a soldier in the confederacy and a man in the South, yet also a firm abolitionist, putting him at odds with most of his contemporaries. The result is that Hightower “grew to manhood among phantoms, and side by side with a ghost” (Faulkner Light in August 474). This does not sound like the upbringing of someone deeply rooted in the society of his contemporaries.

Both Reverend Hightower and Quentin are outsiders, then, and use construction of the South’s past as a way to place themselves back within the community they are exterior to. This is often manifested in the stories themselves. When he arrives in Jefferson, Reverend Hightower talks such that “the dogma he was supposed to preach all full of galloping cavalry and defeat and glory” (Faulkner Light in August 63). His story about his family’s past becomes a fable about the community and humanity, putting him in the community’s history—which the community resents him for doing. Furthermore, he thinks that he “skipped a generation…I had no father and that I had already died one night twenty years before I saw light” (Faulkner Light in August 478). In bringing forth the past in the present, he can imagine himself as his grandfather, a garrulous man who shared values with many other Southerners, rather than as the son of his semi-outcast father, one who still has a soft spot for the plot of African-Americans in the south.

Similarly, in Quentin and Mr. Compson’s stories, General Compson (Jason Compson’s father) plays a large role, both as supplier of information and as Thomas Sutpen’s best friend. Throughout the story, they take pains to emphasize General Compson’s standing in the community— he is able to get people out of jail, loan money, and eventually becomes a higher-up in the Confederate Army. If they are telling stories about the community, and they or their forbearers are in the stories, then in a way they are in the community.

However, the act of telling the past inserts the individual into the community in another way. One final personal anecdote may clarify. Though I am from the South, one would be hard-pressed to find another Southerner who would identify me as “Southern,” or as part of the region’s lineage. I am Jewish and cosmopolitan, with no Southern accent and a disdain for the region’s ideology and history. But when I construct a past of the South, it is one that provokes certain temporal questions in the writers it produces. As someone interested in those questions, I can then position myself as part of this South that shares a history but not a past with the other South. In this, I then assert a claim to membership within the community. Quentin does much the same—the characters in his South are interested in the same questions of miscegenation and incest that he is, and if their thinking is produced by the community’s beliefs, and they think of the same questions as Quentin, then he is produced by the community and its beliefs and hence part of it. Reverend Hightower does something similar, though slightly different. In Light in August Faulkner describes how after the war “men returned home with their eyes stubbornly reverted toward what they refused to believe was dead,” namely the South they once knew (Faulkner Light in August 474). Reverend Hightower, in his obsession with his grandfather’s history and fighting spirit, becomes another one of these men, joining the community. Constructing a past of the South allows individuals who might be excluded based on the actual history to imagine themselves as part of the community.

Finally, we have come to something resembling an understanding of the relationship between the South’s past and individuals in Faulkner. It is a symbiotic relationship—the past cannot exist without these individuals, and the individuals need to create the past to claim a position within the community. It is no wonder they become obsessed with the past—it is their only grasp on those around them. Without it, they would have to disavow the region. But to do that would be to go too far. Instead, they create their own version of the region through their telling of the past, knowing quite well that it differs from actual history. They love the former and hate the latter, but are unable to separate the two, seeing them as one, confusing them, making their denials confirmations and their confirmations denials, until it is all one big neurosis, history and the past bleeding into each other like they had made a blood pact to torture these characters that can never be undone even when Quentin is at the bottom of the river and Reverend Hightower is bleeding on the ground of his house and Caddy is exiled and everyone is dead or crazy except for Shreve practicing surgery in Alberta and maybe occasionally thinking of his suicidal freshman roommate who was hounded by the very past he created into self-destruction and thinking that this is the cost of the south, this is its disease that it destroys the very people who work to create it, chewing up storytellers until there is nothing left of them but empty shells and broken minds. He hates it, he hates it for that and its racism and its absurdity. He does not exist; I hate it and left it and will return more obsessed than when I left.

*This title is adapted from John Moreland’s song “Lies I Choose to Believe”

[2] In fact, even the more peripheral characters interested in the South’s past are in some ways outsiders. Rosa Coldfield lives alone and has almost her entire life, and was raised by an abolitionist father who starved to death rather than help the confederacy. Mr. Compson is an alcoholic and failed classicist. Finally Shreve, who is at times less invested in the act of constructing pasts than Quentin, is Canadian. He is fully the outsider, and is thus able to construct pasts with Quentin without being swallowed by the act, without drowning in the subtle undulations of Mississippi history.

[3] One can see something similar in The Hamlet, where it is Ratliff who tells many of the stories and hence creates the past. Though he is ostensibly part of the community, his job as a travelling salesman takes him away from it for long periods of time.

Tricks of the Light

“Venice thinks it is Amsterdam once again” Sartre writes; the sickly city accepts its grey pallor, using it to play tricks, the sky and the sea switching places, constantly shifting. Today, Providence thinks it is Berlin. The sun never rose. Instead, it destroyed itself, scattering light evenly across the blanket that envelops the city. We become characters in a hermetic work of art, sealed off from the world beyond, a world that no longer exists. The grey offers no escape; the boundlessness of blue skies has been destroyed, replaced by a curtain that isolates us from the horizon. Buildings lose their sense of depth, becoming monstrous, imposing facades, overwrought stage sets looming over the individual. The industrial world’s falsity and meanness become manifest in them, overwhelming us, restoring an awful beauty to the structures that was thought to be lost. There is honesty in this, an honesty clear skies don’t contain. A boundless blue in November promises warmth, a temporary reprieve that it does not deliver. Instead, the clear air bites, stealing skin with each gust of wind. The skies of July whisper that the day should be used for play only to stymie all movement, reabsorbing the nascent energy it pretended to give.

Yes, blue skies are tricksters, but despite their trickiness they offer a truth. The world is overwhelming, it stretches on forever, just like the sky above, and it will never fully be known. How terrifying, these images of a world so filled with information that any attempt to learn is futile, that no matter what, one cannot make a dent in what we do not know. The weather is dialectical, the trickster finds the truth.

Grey skies, on the other hand, offer a comforting lie. You are sealed in, stuck in this separate world. There is meaning solely by existing and a concrete limit on the known. Nonetheless, a terror lurks. That the boundary exists negates the possibility that Providence is a world unto itself; if works of art can only be understood as a whole, as the sum of a myriad of seemingly contradictory elements mediated into truth, then we can never understand what we are in, for we are never outside of this. The absence of truth haunts us as we walk. Where the does the breathtaking horror at the stone cathedral come from? We do not know and so it seems inherent, ontological, a state of being. The wet black pavement begins to reflect what little light there is, turning it into a shining darkness, each step promising the void. The staged nature makes the abstract feel more real, offering an epistemology we cannot grasp. I take a step and the void hardens into asphalt, becoming physical. It is reality’s futile attempt to impose itself, holding only until my shoe lifts again.

On Irma

“There may not be an airport. It is in the salt ponds.” That was my mom’s response when I told my family I wanted to fly to Key West to help clean up once Irma passed. She’s right. Last I heard, downtown hadn’t flooded, but the worst was yet to hit. Our friends taking refuge on the second floor of our house haven’t been able to communicate since 2 AM.

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Once, in a letter, I wrote that “a certain type of person moves to Key West: those who see themselves in the shimmering heat, in the promise of a cooling wind of the power boat, a wind that in reality brings with it turbulent waters and spilled beer. Key West—an island with mediocre beaches, good bars, a modicum of history, and filled with obese tourists hailing from Alabama and Kansas—is only livable when seen through a specific set of eyes. The difference between the Harvard professor on vacation there and the homeless man he became, throwing Frisbees up and down the beach while yelling to himself, is a suntan.”

Now I wonder whether this was truly the case, whether there is something more at play. How does one live on an island with no future, a place that will be underwater in seventy years—that is, if the hurricanes don’t destroy it first? In such a situation, what else can one do but drink and fuck?

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Homelessness in Key West is pervasive and visible in a way not often found elsewhere. An island with warm nights, drunken tourists, and an accepting ethos entices those who the nation has failed, those we try to sweep under the rug, those we hate and attack for no reason beyond their sheer existence. As I watch television footage of waves crashing over the southernmost point and winds shaking even the most structurally sound houses, I wonder if this is nothing less than a genocide, our cruelty driving them to Key West while our obsession with meat and cars sentences the island to death.

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The most recent time I was in Key West, the wind tried to blow, but the air was too thick with humidity and heat, oversized particles moving faster then they were ever meant to, blocking the cooling breeze before it started. Two friends had accompanied my family and me down.

Halfway through the trip, we took a motorboat to our favorite beach, an unexplored nature preserve filled with mosquitos, crabs, and spiders. As we stood in the lukewarm water, one friend turned to me and said, “this will be underwater soon.”

The heat beat down. Behind us a storm was forming. The humidity thickened until it consumed me, the heavy air becoming an extension of my body, a weight that could be neither carried nor dropped, inescapable to the last.

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It is not, as is commonly supposed, that heat and insanity are closely intertwined, that the former causes the latter—sunbeams whispering in the ears of the unwell, pushing the unstable to the edge. Rather, tropical warmth is insanity; the rich drunk with his hand in the pool is no different from a heat wave; the man muttering on the sidewalk is not caused by the humidity but is in fact a manifestation of it. Climate change is nothing more than the amplification of a world gone mad.

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I don’t know why our friends didn’t evacuate when they could, why they stayed put while even the most stalwart of locals ran. I wonder if they regret it. Probably not. Whatever the case, I cannot imagine them in our attic terrified, shining flashlights out to watch the encroaching waters. In fact, I can’t imagine any local like that. I wonder if they’re having a two-person party as the world collapses around them, drinking and trying to find joy in the horror. I wonder if, in the back of their mind, they know that this is only a practice run for what will become the new normal, that the indeterminate future has become the present, that the American public has weighed the options and decided their lives aren’t worth the extra hassle of biking to work. I wonder if the drinking is defiance or resignation.

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My friend’s prediction has come true sooner than any of us could imagine. The preserve has undoubtedly become swamped. That is the least of the Keys’ problems. People say that we won’t know the extent of the damage until the storm passes. But the storm will never pass. Irma is just the first act, a warning shot that hit us in the stomach, a rude reminder that our modern peace with nature was only an armistice. The coming barrage will be infinitely worse, nature’s inimical violence responding to human degeneracy in kind. It won’t make us change direction, of course; we’ll keep marching straight towards the barrage, putting those we care about least in front. Future generations will see us as no different from the Victorian era British viceroys who ignored drought in India, letting millions die to prove the legitimacy of the free market. Like them, most of us will face no official consequences for our actions. There will be no trials, no formal declaration of human rights violations. Just the slowly rising water, it’s cosmic timeframe letting us slip into eternity before it can deliver its sentence. In the meantime, we will sacrifice our most vulnerable in a failed attempt to appease that which has no morals. In doing so, we will find the same about ourselves.

Havana Libre: Smartphones, Socialism, Futurism.

The reason 50’s futurism fizzled out, the story goes, is because we chose to pursue communicative technology instead of transportation tech. We have IPhones instead of teleporters, exploding Samsungs instead of Fords falling out of the sky. It’s true—though when visiting Cuba, with its somewhat maintained 50’s architecture, one realizes this is not the entire story. There is an aspect of utopia in all mid-century futurism. But this hopeful element is a disavowal of itself. The architecture promises a post-scarcity world, yet it is inseparable from the system that built it, a capitalism that demands artificial shortages and discrimination. The style provokes—overwhelming nostalgia, indescribable anger, uncontrollable laughter. In this emotion, there is a danger to the dominant economic order, however miniscule. Better to abandon the whole charade, replace it with something more manageable—technologies whose utopian promise comes not from its form but from the insistence of its corporate creators. This isn’t to suggest some grand conspiracy, that a cabal consciously switched our path—just that capital mutates itself and society to insure its survival. Modern technology refuses to express the alienation it has accelerated.

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Flying Saucer or Water Tower?

The Habana Libre Hotel, formerly the Havana Hilton, is a particularly enjoyable piece of 50’s futurism, with a grand foyer that includes a Flintstones-looking interior pond surrounded by plastic plants lit via strategically placed light orbs. Though seemingly ceiling-less like a post-modernist Portman monstrosity, it has none of the invocations of late capital, none of the overwhelming feeling that money is moving somewhere above, though god knows where or how. The attached restaurant looks like something you’d see out on Route 66—the lack of turquoise mini-skirts is the only thing saving it from kitsch. The Cuban government has restored but not renovated the interior, freezing the building in its non-existent future. The reason for this stay of construction is not the U.S. embargo, as most Americans believe, but a Castro-era law that bans eviction and demolitions within cities. What are melancholic remnants in the United States still dominate the Havana landscape, ghostly utopian figures built by exploitative mobsters. A mile west from the Habana Libre and a couple blocks closer to the coast sits the Riviera. Meyer Lansky built it in 1957, right around the time Bautista sold the country to the mob. Indeed, it was part and parcel of that fire sale. The mobsters are gone and the fountains in front no longer work, but the building’s revolutionary power is stronger than ever. Though not in the condition of the Habana Libre, it’s been mostly maintained, simultaneously a reminder of colonial exploitation and a stepping-stone on the revolutionary path to utopia. The buildings are the aesthetic promise of free education, an admonishment to prioritize universal healthcare over nationwide 4G. Back in the lobby of the Habana Libre, twenty-three floors below Fidel’s first office, locals and tourists alike stare at Samsungs, whispering prayers that they connect to the spotty wi-fi.

 

havana-hilton-exterior

The similarity between the Cuban countryside, with its warm greens and soft browns, and its North Carolina counterpart is startling. Sure, there are differences—sand is more prevalent in the land of the pines, diversifying the hues of brown and darkening the overall landscape; Cubans prefer corrugated tin shanties to the trailers of the same material and cost found in Oriental. But the prevalence of the tobacco fields dotted with out of place deciduous firs, the three house towns, the obsidian-colored remnants of controlled fires, the unshakeable feeling, no matter how inland you go, that you’re on the coast—all of these things outweigh the aesthetic difference between cotton and sugar-cane.[1]

There is one overwhelming difference, however: mountains. The portion of the Appalachians running through inland North Carolina is wide and broad and filled with valleys, fully dominating the landscape. When nearby, one recognizes that they’re in the highlands. Contrast this with the Sierra Maestra, a range rising out of the plains, thin enough at points as to appear a single row deep, the spine of a sleeping giant ready to awaken at any moment. It lends the landscape a sci-fi air; the traveler feels like an explorer, their chartered bus a landing shuttle, driving through a virgin world where Marxism has remained dominant. Teenagers on horses leave their pink stucco homes, riding past propagandistic graffiti—“if we arrive, we win”—and spray-painted portraits of Ché. Not even the tour guide’s IPhone had reception in the area.

countryside

The classic cars that dot Havana are protected—the government views them as vital to the city’s fabric. The ban is a result of the boom in European tourism in the early 2000’s; visiting Germans would fall in love with 1950’s Firebirds held together with duck tape and ingenuity and end up trading their lightly used BMW’s for them. Around the same time, a taxi industry using the doddering Dodges became popular among tourists, turning the owners of the cars into members of an upper class—itself newly formed because of a quirk of the two-currency system. The currency for tourists, the Cuban Convertible Peso (or CUC), is twenty-five times stronger than the local peso. A tip from a traveler, given in USD or CUC’s, is much greater than even what a surgeon earns in a day. Further, in an effort to maintain separation between tourists and locals, places like museums, orchestras, theatres, even ice creams shops across the nation have two lines—a longer one for local currencies, and an express line for people paying in CUC’s. Cubans with access to CUC’s can choose either line, paying more for shorter waits and better seats, an explicit signifier of class difference where none previously existed. As the cabbies ferry tourists around Havana, they remain glued to their IPhones, drifting between lanes and ignoring the architecture around them.

The last night in Havana, our group took some of these classic taxis to the restaurant where we were celebrating my grandmother’s 80th birthday, hoping to simultaneously transport us across space and her back in time. As the driver shut the passenger side door, we began to roll backwards, slipping toward the Riviera, sliding down the hill we were halfway up. The driver, playing on his Samsung, didn’t notice the movement.

 

[1] This, of course, neglecting the similarities of the two with regard to their historical position as cash crops with all that entails, i.e. that for centuries the economies of the two places were tied to Europeans’ desire for sweetener and/or lightweight, breathable fabrics in a way that actively harmed the lives of those producing the products.

A Few Things to do During Your first Week in Hong Kong.

Update: Hong Kong has grown on me somewhat since I wrote this piece.

Don’t sleep on the flight. Land in Hong Kong. Wait in the airport. Buy a SIM card. Wait some more. Get on a train. Fit your luggage onto the comically small luggage rack. Find a seat. Squeeze into said seat. Watch the dots between stations on the map disappear. Get off the train. Take in the smell. Look for your ride. Look some more. Gape at the amount of neon. Miss someone you shouldn’t. Look at the decrepit high rises. Gaze at the brand new ones next door. Feel the city’s claustrophobia. Try to sleep. Wonder if Hong Kong is on a fault line. Debate whether it’s better to Google and risk lots of anxiety, or not know and have a constant hum of worry. Wake up at 5:00. Scroll through twitter. Read. Feel bad. Try to explore. Get stuck. Take a taxi. Pass a tent village, then immediately after a Ritz-Carlton. Notice a dog in the street. Force your taxi to change lanes. Hope the other cars do to. See the dog’s owner trying to fix her blanket house. Get to a new hotel. Stand by the window. See aluminum lean-to’s in the alley across the street. Get stuck in a glass box. Eat noodles. Walk by a flipped taxi. Gawk. Hail a different one. Fasten your seatbelt. Send a text you’ll regret. Throw up. Try to sleep. Fail. Read. Take Ambien. Wake up at 6:00. Feel sick. Go for a walk. Get rained on. Realize you forgot a raincoat. Compulsively check for a read receipt. Put in earphones. Can’t escape the city noise. Try to explain the city’s simultaneous over- and under-saturation. Walk through an empty museum. Breathe. Drink coffee. Fall into a half-sleep. Hail taxi. Overpay. Try to film. Realize it won’t work. Walk through mall. Worry you left part of camera. Don’t go back. Worry more. Let the worry consume your body. Get in a taxi. Get out of the taxi. Get into a new taxi. Open up twitter. See election news. Close twitter. Agree to wingman. Pontificate. Leave bar at first opportunity. Stare at passing Maserati. Smile at homeless man next to you. Take in the neon. Get into a taxi. Try to tell the cabbie your address. Sigh. Get out of taxi. Hail another taxi. Try again. Pay and get out a block early. Stumble into your room. Watch Road to El Dorado. Hear sirens outside. Complain. Yell. Fall mostly asleep. Wake up. Try to go back to sleep. Get up. Drink coffee. Walk to a park. Trip over someone’s heel. Fall into the street. Get berated. Shudder at the number of people in the park. Realize it’s a workday. Walk to the garden. Put in earphones; still no silence. Look around; see ugly high-rises on all sides. Get claustrophobic. Be overwhelmed by the stickiness of the air. Don’t stop scratching yourself. Refuse to use the front of your hands because they touched the street. Think there are spiders on your legs. Check. Get rained on. Stare at yourself in a window. Stare more. Loathe everything. Wish you could throw up again. Check your read receipts. Debate going to a museum. Move to a new hotel. Sit in the new hotel’s lounge. Smile at the sun nearly shining through the clouds. See a group of six police officers approach a fruit stand. Furrow your brow. Observe a long discussion between the police and the three women running the stand. Remember the staggering number of police vans on a single street in the commercial district. Wonder why the police travel in large packs here. Get nervous. Think about why you are nervous. Think some more. Believe the superstition your travel buddy made up is widely believed. Consider if you’re racist. Consider more. Get out of a taxi. Get into a taxi. Close your eyes as it nearly hits a bus. Pray. Think of ways to convey the overwhelming nature of the city. Worry you’re abandoning your few strengths. Order an Uber. Debate whether using Uber makes you a bad person. Settle on yes. Get into the Uber. Call your sister. Talk about the disparity here. Turn down the AC. Watch shirtless construction worker outside shake his water bottle. Fall half-asleep. Dream about checking your read receipts. Try to run from the noise. Try to pull the sticky air off your skin. Wish you could throw up. Pass a homeless man. Learn your hotel has an espresso machine free to use.