But the Prince Prospero1 was happy and dauntless and sagacious. When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of his court, and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys. . . With such precautions the courtiers might bid defiance to contagion. The external world could take care of itself. In the meantime it was folly to grieve, or to think. -- Edgar Allan Poe, "The Masque of the Red Death"

Most of the history we are familiar with focuses on the actions of great men and, only recently and still very rarely, of great women. I’m speaking of literary history as practiced by Thomas Carlyle, Francis Parkman, and Henry Adams in the 19^th century and by Doris Kearns Goodwin, Eric Foner, Annette Gordon-Reed, and Sean Wilentz in the 20^th and 21st. Of course when I say ‘great’ I am not speaking of a moral quality. I am speaking of the power and force of character that allowed certain individuals to wreak vast changes on their world, often horrible, catastrophic changes. In the context of history, Pharaoh Akhnaten was great. So were Joan of Arc and Abraham Lincoln and the Emperor Meiji and Martin Luther King. So were Hitler and Stalin (and both of them were chosen by Time Magazine as its Man of the Year, interestingly enough, in the consecutive years 1938 and 1939).

This is history that dwells in the heights. It’s history from the perspective of the throne room and the cathedral spire. You can see quite far from the heights but at the sacrifice of depth and detail. The king in his keep doesn’t know when his subjects are going hungry because they had to give their first harvest to his tax collectors. The archbishop doesn’t hear the prayers they say kneeling beside their cots at night, only the ones they say in church, in Latin, a language most of them don’t understand.

But starting in France in the years after World War II, historians began to approach their subject at ground level, with particular attention to the ordinary people who lived there. The word ‘peasant’ is derived from the French paysan, which means of the pays, the country.

Fernand Braudel, Philippe Aries, and Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie wrote about the way those people—peasants and laborers and shopkeepers and members of the minor nobility—made a living, married and married off their children, worshiped, blasphemed and readied themselves for death. They wrote about how those people got drunk, as in this passage from Braudel’s The Structures of Everyday Life: Civilization and Capitalism, 15^th-18^th Century:

Drunkenness increased everywhere in the sixteenth century. Consumption in Valladolid reached 100 litres per person per year in the middle of the century; in Venice, the Signoria was obliged to take new and severe action against public drunkenness in 1598; in France, Laffemas was quite positive on that point at the beginning of the seventeenth century. This widespread urban drunkenness never required high-quality wine; coarse types of vines with high yields were becoming general in commercial vineyards. In the eighteenth century, the movement reached the countryside itself (the taverns there were the ruin of the peasants) and became more pronounced in the towns. Mass consumption became general with the establishment of the guingettes at the gates of Paris, outside the boundaries of the town, where the aides, the tax of ‘four sous admittance for one bottle which intrinsically is only worth three,’ was not chargeable.

Commoners, artisans, grisettes,

All leave Paris and run to the guingettes.

Two pints for the price of a single booze

On two boat’s benches, without cloth or serviettes.

You’ll drink so much in these Bacchic stews

That out of your eyes the wine will ooze. . .”

You can appreciate the scope of this passage, which races from Spain to Venice to the outskirts of Paris, and you can appreciate its specificity and its liveliness, its vision of folks packing the road houses of the 18^th century—begging the question of whether road houses could be said to exist in an age before automobiles—to get shit-faced on cut-rate wine. It’s a scene that’s familiar to anyone who’s spent time looking at Bruegels

or to anyone who ever spent time in a dive bar.

To write history from the point of view of the groundlings, one should whenever possible use the groundlings’ words. These can be found in letters and diaries, with the caveat that in most of the world for most of history most people wrote neither because most people didn’t write. Some did, though, like the 14^th-century Florentine landowner who wrote this reminiscence of the Black Death in his city:

“Such was the terror this caused that seeing it take hold in a household, as soon as it started, nobody remained: everybody abandoned the dwelling in fear, and fled to another; some fled into the city and others into the countryside. No doctors were to be found, because they were dying like everybody else; those who could be found wanted exorbitant fees cash-in-hand before entering the house, and having entered, they took the patient’s pulse with their heads turned away, and assayed the urine samples from afar, with aromatic herbs held to their noses. Sons abandoned fathers, husbands wives, wives husbands, one brother the other, one sister the other. The city was reduced to bearing the dead to burial; many died who at their passing had neither confession nor last sacraments, and many died unseen, and many died of hunger, for when somebody took ill to his bed, the other occupants in panic told him: ‘I’m going for the doctor’; and quietly locked the door from the outside and didn’t come back . . . .

“. . . At every church, or at most of them, pits were dug, down to the water-table, as wide and deep as the parish was populous; and therein, whosoever was not very rich, having died during the night, would be shouldered by those whose duty it was, and would either be thrown into this pit, or they would pay big money for somebody else to do it for them. The next morning there would be very many in the pit. Earth would be taken and thrown down on them; and then others would come on top of them, and then earth on top again, in layers, with very little earth, like garnishing lasagne with cheese.”1

The homeliness of the last image, as well as its frank, uncensored grossness, marks it as the production of a witness, and a witness of the country, who knew how lasagne (plural) were made.

In the last century, thanks in large part to the tape recorder and its digital offspring, it became possible to collect such testimony directly from history’s witnesses and participants. ‘Collect’ makes the process sound artless. Trust me, it isn’t. If you’ve ever watched or listened to a lax, formless interview, you know that getting someone to tell you their story requires more than just asking questions. It requires asking questions that elicit a story. I don’t quite know what questions Svetlana Alexievich asked the men and women whose voices populate Voices from Chernobyl and Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, the first book an oral history of the greatest catastrophe of the atomic age, the second a reckoning with the collapse of the USSR. (She’s written other books, but for this piece I’ll just speak about these two). You can infer some of her questions from the things those people say, sometimes addressing her directly:

I’ll remember everything for you. The planes are flying and flying. Every day. They fly real, real low, right over our heads. They’re flying to the reactor. To the station. One after the other. While here we have the evacuation. They’re moving us out. Storming the houses. People have gone under cover, they’re hiding. The livestock is moaning, the kids are crying. It’s war! And the sun’s out. . . I sat down and didn’t come out of the hut, though it’s true I didn’t lock up either. The soldiers knocked. ‘Ma’am, have you packed up?’ And I said: ‘Are you going to tie my hands and feet?’ They didn’t say anything, didn’t say anything, and then they left. 2

I’m not afraid of death anymore. Of death itself. But I don’t know how I’m going to die. My friend died. He got huge, fat, like a barrel. And my neighbor—he was also there, he worked a crane. He got black, like coal, and shrunk, so that he was wearing kids’ clothes. I don’t know how I’m going to die. I do know this: you don’t last long with my diagnosis. But I’d like to feel it when it happens. Like if I got a bullet in the head. I was in Afghanistan, too. It was easier there. They just shot you.3

This crazy woman appeared in town suddenly. She’d walk around the market saying, ‘I’ve seen the radiation. It’s blue as blue, it spills over everything.’ People stopped buying milk and cottage cheese at the market. An old lady would be standing with her milk, no one’s buying it. ‘Don’t worry,’ she’d say, ‘I don’t let my cow out into the field. I bring her her grass myself.’ If you drove out of town, you’d see these scarecrows: a cow all wrapped in cellophane, and then an old farmer woman next to her, also wrapped in cellophane. You could cry, you could laugh. 4

One night we were walking home from the movies and stumbled on a man lying in a pool of blood. There was a bullet hole in the back of his trench coat and a cop standing over him. That was the first time I’d ever seen someone who’d been murdered. Pretty soon it became a familiar sight. We live in a big building with twenty entrances. Every morning, they’d find another body in the courtyard—eventually we stopped being shocked. Real capitalism was here. With blood. I thought that I’d be disturbed, but I wasn’t. After Stalin, we have a different relationship to murder. We remember how our people had killed their own . . . the mass murder of people who didn’t understand why they were being killed. . . It’s stayed with us, it’s part of our lives. We grew up among victims and executioners. For us, living together is normal. 5

I’d sit on my father’s shoulders with a red balloon tied to my wrist. Up in the sky, over the marching columns, loomed the huge portraits of Lenin and Stalin. . . Marx . . . Garlands and bouquets of red, blue, and yellow balloons. Red everywhere. My favorite color in the world. The color of the Revolution and the blood spilled in its name. . . . The Great October Revolution! Today they’re calling it a military coup, the Bolshevik conspiracy . . . the Russian catastrophe . . . Saying Lenin was a German agent and the Revolution was brought about by deserters and drunken sailors. I cover my ears. I don’t want to hear it! It’s more than I can take. . . .My whole life, I’ve believed that we were the luckiest people on earth. 6

We still have our vouchers. In thirty years I’ll sell them to a museum. You can’t even fathom how much I hate that country . . . I hate the Victory Day parade! All those prefab concrete apartment blocks with their balconies crammed full of jars of pickled tomatoes and cucumbers. They make me sick. . . And all that old furniture. 7

Why are you smiling? Everyone laughs at me, I know . . . If you live the way your heart tells you to, people will think you’re crazy. You tell them the truth and people don’t believe you, but when you lie, they eat up every word. One day, I was digging in my garden, and a guy I knew came walking by. I said, ‘Wow, guess what, Petya? You were in my dream the other night.’ ‘Oh no! Anything but that!’ He ran from me like I was a leper. I’m not like everyone else, people are wary of me . . . I don’t try to please anyone, I don’t pay any attention to what I wear, I don’t wear makeup. I don’t know how to flirt. I only know how to talk to someone. For a while, I had wanted to go join a monastery, but then I read you can lead a monastic life outside of one, at home. It can be how you live. 8

I’ll be honest. Originally, I was going to talk about some other writers of oral history: Studs Terkel, whose books Division Street, Working, Hard Times, and The Good War say more about the America of our parents and grandparents than a thousand reverential History Channel documentaries; Nate Cobb, aka Nate Shaw, an eighty-four year old sharecropper from Tukabahchee County, Alabama whose standoff with a group of white sheriff’s deputies who were trying to seize his neighbor’s property in 1932 is the dramatic highpoint of All God’s Dangers, an oral autobiography as thrilling and rich in incident as The Odyssey that demonstrates how a man whose main preoccupations were farming, fattening his mules, and circumventing predatory white men and their laws became—was forced to become—a hero of the civil rights movement at a time when that movement barely existed beyond the deepest of the deep South:

I just stood right on and I was standin alone. I seed there was weak spots in them men and there was bad acts comin up, but I didn’t run a step. I stood there and they all runned out of there like rats runnin out of a woodpile, and all of them that run, run out the back. I didn’t let that worry me; I just taken it for granted and let em go. I didn’t think about gettin shot and I didn’t think about not gettin shot. I thought this: a organization is a organization and if I don’t mean nothin by joinin I ought to keep my ass out of it. But if I’m sworn to stand up for all the poor colored farmers—and poor white farmers if they’d takin a notion to join—I’ve got to do it. Weren’t no use under God’s sun to treat colored people like we’d been treated here in the state of Alabama. 9

But doing justice to those books would have meant shortchanging Alexievich. Alexievich is Belarussian and the first writer from that country and the first journalist ever to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. In the former Soviet Union she was attacked for defaming the soldiers who fought in the Afghan War of 1979-1989. In her own country she was tried repeatedly by the flamboyantly corrupt and repressive Lukashenko regime, which has lately partnered with its Russian counterpart in the invasion of Ukraine. Critics in the U. S. have criticized her for what at times seems like an indifference to chronology: most of the interviews—which should properly be called monologues—in her books are undated.

Only Marxism treats history as a science, but most historians treat it as a field of scholarship, an inquiry into objective truth that assembles and analyzes data to make factual claims. The goal of that labor is to persuade us that this is what happened in a particular place and time, and how and why it happened. But oral history is an inquiry into subjective truth. You can argue about whether such a thing is an oxymoron. (Misha Defonseca, who in the late 1990s published what could politely be called an apocryphal memoir in which she claimed to have been rescued from the S. S. as a little girl by some friendly wolves, eventually admitted, “It’s not the true reality, but it is my reality.” As a rule of thumb, watch out for anybody who speaks of “my reality.”)

And yet in a sense what oral history records is the individual reality of its subjects. Another less pretentious way of putting it is that oral history records what history feels like to the people who pass through it, whom it passes through, goading them in one direction or another, sometimes convulsing them where they stand, sometimes burning them alive. On announcing Alexievich’s Nobel Prize, the Swedish Academy described her work as “a history of emotions.”

And in her address to the academy, she said, “I am drawn to that small space called a human being … a single individual. In reality, that is where everything happens. . . I collect the everyday life of feelings, thoughts, and words. I collect the life of my time. I’m interested in the history of the soul. The everyday life of the soul, the things that the big picture of history usually omits, or disdains. I work with missing history.” 10

One signature of Alexievich’s work is that on first reading each of the stories she records feels sui generis, the experience of a single man or woman who may not—doesn’t—know that something similar, has befallen others, sometimes many others: a young newlywed sneaking into the hospital to watch her firefighter husband, who was sent to put out the blaze at the reactor, literally disintegrate before her eyes; a soldier charged with exterminating the dogs and cats abandoned in contaminated villages to keep them from spreading the contamination as they wander; an elderly couple so determined to stay in their home that they hide in the forest when the patrols come by, a ritual dimly remembered from the Great War of fifty years before, when people hid that way from the Nazis. A father who gives his son Solzhenitsyn to read and is appalled to hear him laugh at it. An Armenian woman married to an Azerbaijani man whose people become her enemies overnight. A woman whose teenaged son hangs himself in the bathroom of their apartment. A woman whose daughter is disfigured in a terrorist attack on the metro. A woman whose daughter is killed serving as a military police officer in Chechnya, maybe by Chechens, maybe by her own side. A man who runs out on his fiancée after a frank conversation with her grandfather, who fondly recalls torturing ‘counterrevolutionaries’ for the NKVD:

“We picture monsters with horns and hooves. But there he was, by the looks of it, a regular person sitting there. . . just a normal person . . . blowing his nose, drinking vodka. I think . . . that was the first time it occurred to me—that the victims stick around and testify while the executioners hold their silence.” 11

Both victims and executioners have seen their old world cease to exist in a metaphorical heartbeat. Some of them are furious about it:

Happiness is here, huh? Sure, there’s salami and bananas. We’re rolling around in shit and eating foreign food. Instead of a Motherland, we live in a huge supermarket. If this is freedom, I don’t need it. 12

Some recoil in horror:

All I hear is that life is a battle, the strong defeat the weak, and this is the law of nature. You have to grow some horns and hooves, a thick skin, no one needs weaklings anymore. Everywhere you go it’s elbows, elbows, and more elbows. This is fascism, this is the swastika! I’m in shock . . . and despair. This is not my world! 13

At bottom, they’re all stunned. A stunned nation, wandering through a landscape they once recognized as theirs:

They say ‘Chernobyl,’ and they write ‘Chernobyl.’ But no one knows what it is. Something frightening opened up before us. Everything is different. We aren’t born the same, we don’t die the same. If you ask me. How do people die after Chernobyl?’ 14

Some people love rupture; they get rich off it. Mark Zuckerberg told employees to “Break things and move fast” and look how well it worked out for them. But if you are one of rupture’s beneficiaries, the temptation is to keep breaking things. The thing is, the victims want to break things, too. They want the world that was taken from them, and some of them would drown the new world in blood to have that old world back. The same has happened elsewhere.

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Almost three months have passed since I last posted here. In partial explanation, I’ve been working on a long post about a radical, almost unclassifiable film I saw in a private screening last summer. I don’t even know whether to call it a film, since part of its enchantment is the large (six feet in diameter), convex, gold-enameled wooden disk on which…

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Most novel series, like most novels, conform to standard chronology, starting at one point in time and ending at a later one. This only makes sense. We live our lives forward, and we’re drawn to stories that reflect our experience of being. This is even more true of historical fiction. Claudius outlives Augustus, Tiberius, and Caligula to become Emperor of Rome, evidently one of the few who wasn’t a preening sociopath. Thomas Cromwell rises through the court of Henry VIII until his power is almost equal to the King’s, then falls from favor and dies on the block. This is how history appears to us, who live through it. Transfixed by its emergent catastrophes, trying to guess where the rubble will fall so we can get out of the way, we don’t look back to see where the first cracks opened in the foundation. We leave that work to the historians.

Jayne Anne Phillips’s war trilogy is atypical in that it moves backward through historical time, starting with Vietnam (Machine Dreams, 1984), proceeding through Korea (Lark and Termite, 2009) and ending with the Civil War (Night Watch, 2025). Some of this may be because she didn’t conceive the books as a trilogy. “Machine Dreams, for me, was the ‘hometown’ novel, the ‘first novel,’” she says. “But the fact of Vietnam made the book so much bigger and deeper because the war so influenced hometowns and comings-of-age for my generation. The war took over . . . . When I began Lark And Termite . . . the trilogy was going to play out, reversing in time . . . . I don’t see the long-distance future, and I think I am not even that interested in it. I see the present and the truth in the past.” That last suggests Phillips’s debt to Faulkner, the most backward-looking American writer.

There’s one literary genre where time commonly moves in reverse, the murder mystery or detective story. A forward-moving narrative that tracks an investigator’s progress toward the solution to a crime gives way, usually at the climactic point, to a narrative that moves backward toward the moment when the crime was committed. [1] Maybe the story was moving backward all along. In ordinary chronology events appear on the horizon or come smashing at you from around a corner. In reverse chronology, protagonist and reader burrow through the geological strata of events that have already taken place. What’s happened can’t unhappen, the dead stay dead. Not even Nero Wolfe or Jane Tennison can bring them back to life. The detective’s power is the power to bring the murderer to justice. And while the past is fixed, in crime fiction it becomes conceptually unstable. The killer wasn’t the drunken army officer who’d been throwing around money he couldn’t account for but a despised servant faking an epileptic fit. The quarrelsome stranger you killed in a fight was actually your father, who put you out to die when you were a baby.

Phillips’s war trilogy burrows through the strata of American history, down through Vietnam and Korea to the bedrock of one of the nation’s foundational crimes, the crime the Civil War was fought to end, though in the beginning not even Lincoln really meant to end slavery. Appropriately, Night Watch begins with a cover-up. In 1874, nine years after the war’s end, on a remote homestead in the breakaway state of West Virginia, a hard man and a young girl bundle a mute woman into a buckboard and drive some ways to the town of Weston. The girl is named ConaLee; the man is called Papa, or that’s what he’s taught the girl to call him. The woman is ConaLee’s mother Eliza, but she’s been told to call her Miss Janet and to pass herself off as her maid. Nearly everyone in this novel goes by a false name, sometimes more than one. Sometimes we never learn who they really are. The man delivers his passengers to the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum. “’It is for all the best people. . . Quality people,’” he tells them before driving off. Girl and woman enter. It’s just before dawn.

The Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum was a real place, run according to the principles of Thomas Story Kirkbride, a Quaker physician who proposed a course of “moral treatment” for the mentally ill: its basics were pleasant surroundings, wholesome food, fresh air, and exercise. By the standards of the time and compared to what ConaLee and her mother experienced during the war and after the asylum is a utopia. But it’s a dark utopia, haunted by the cries of some of its patients and by the memories of others. The man who admits the newcomers seems of a piece with it:

A tall man, broad in the shoulders, stood looking down at us. He was dressed almost like a train conductor, all in black, and his cap was round, with a round bill. He wore a patch that covered his right eye from brow to cheekbone, with a livid scar beneath.

He introduces himself as O’ Shea, the Night Watch.

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What is “Downtown”? Is it the Abstract Expressionists’ West 9th Street, or the Soho and Tribeca of succeeding generations of artists? Is it the East Village of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, the Nuyorican Poets’ Café or the Bowery of CBGB? Is it Williamsburg, Bushwick, or Ridgewood? Is Downtown synonymous with the avant-garde or any art movement in its …

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Reading “The Heavenly Animal,” you get a partial preview of the kind of writer Jayne Anne Phillips would become in the years that followed, as represented by the novels Machine Dreams, Lark and Termite, and Night Watch; the last won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for fiction; Lark and Termite was a finalist for the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award. Published decades apart and, at least in the beginning, without an overarching plan, these haunting, haunted books trace the aftershocks of three American wars in small West Virginia towns like the one where Phillips grew up: Vietnam in Machine Dreams, Korea in Lark and Termite, and the Civil War in Night Watch. They complete and undermine the ideas of those wars that inform works like The Naked and the Dead, The Things They Carried, The Hunters, and even The Red Badge of Courage. They sidestep the dualities that structure traditional male war narratives: courage/cowardice, truth/deception, freedom/constraint, and in particular danger/safety. Instead, they render what Susan Griffin calls “the private life of war,” the way war imperceptibly enters the habits of peacetime and the hearts and minds of noncombatants.

Most of the noncombatants are women, often mothers and daughters, the relationship between mothers and daughters being the fundamental bond in almost all of Phillips’s fiction, the most lasting, the most nuanced, the most fraught. Machine Dreams begins with Jean Hampson telling her daughter Danner the story of her life— in effect, telling her who she is—with a tender specificity that takes in a generation’s burden of loss and disappointment: “People had lost whatever was taken in those years and survived.” The bulk of the novel unfolds between 1942 and 1972, between the time Danner’s father Mitch enlists in the Army during World War II and the time her brother Billy disappears in Vietnam. What happens in it is what happens in a lot of families, or what happened back then: Mitch and Jean marry and raise children; Mitch loses a business and flounders trying to earn a living some other way; Jean becomes the family breadwinner; Mitch and Jean grow apart; Danner and Billy grow up. The events are like the numbers on a clock face that provide an outward corollary for one’s inward sense of time.

Phillips is concerned with moments that engage that inward sense: a New Year’s Eve party at the VFW where Jean sees Mitch flirting with another woman; a morning Billy spends at his father’s cement plant; a choral performance by the ministers for whom Danner is waitressing at her summer job at a Methodist college:

There was a hush in the room and the waitresses looked at each other confusedly. One of the men sounded a note on a pitch pipe. Then, in the silence, they began to sing. Their voices were strong and perfect. Behind them, the air conditioner whirred, its steady laboring their only accompaniment.

Amazing grace, they sang slowly, how sweet the sound.

The waitresses stood still, surprised. The song filled the hall and was somehow reminiscent of childhood; the same plaintive melody was sung at countless day camps and night sings, at reunions and revivals, at funerals and YWCA and Rainbow Girls. But the ministers didn’t sound plaintive; their voices were stalwart and definite. They were breaking bad news and offering comfort, and the words seemed ancient, confessional, inarguable. I once was lost. But now. I’m found. Their powerful voices made Danner a little afraid. Were they really found, and what did it mean?

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There are the artists you inherit and the artists you discover, though really it should be the artists you think you’ve discovered. For a long time I had the pleasant delusion that I’d discovered Thomas Pynchon. And I actually did discover the Velvet Underground because I bought the first album knowing nothing— I mean NOTHING— about them, I just liked the cover when I came across it in the bin at Sam Goody’s: the matte-yellow banana with its thick black seams, the lubricious taunt of “Peel slowly and see.” I did, my life was changed. I was fourteen. Never mind that the same discovery had been made by others before me, many others. Brian Eno says there were 30,000, and all of them were so jazzed by what they heard that they started bands.

I’m pretty sure I knew nothing about Jayne Anne Phillips when I first read Sweethearts and Counting, the books that came out from small presses in the late 1970s. I may have come across them at a small-press book fair. Maybe I was drawn to the covers, which looked like the covers of poetry books, or reassured to open them and find prose, since most poetry irritated or baffled me, the words that seemed to have been piped out of pastry bags to tell me how stupid I was. Prose I could understand. Still, Phillips’s prose had the mysteriousness of poetry, its mystery arising from its compression, its excision of almost everything except the pure, irreducible image:

She moved at the bar, rippled her thighs. Horses. Pounding track at a county show. Blue flies bit women in hats. Children then were savage, hurt each other in the grass. Women tongued their teeth in the heat, touched his private throat.

— Counting, 1978

(This and all other excerpts copyright Jayne Anne Phillips, except where noted)

Share Peter Trachtenberg: Not Dark Yet

We went to the movies every Friday and Sunday. On Friday nights the Colonial filled with an oily fragrance of teenagers while we hid in the back row of the balcony. An aura of light from the projection booth curved across our shoulders, round under cotton sweaters. Sacred grunts rose in black corners. The screen was far away and spilling color—big men sweating on their horses and women with powdered breasts floating under satin. Near the end the film smelled hot and twisted as boys shuddered and girls sank down in their seats.

—Sweethearts, 1976

As in poetry, there was little exposition. The characters were here and then they were somewhere else, impelled by forces as secret as the ones in quantum physics. There was something particulate about Phillips’s people, a solitude so dense nothing could escape it:

She remembered walking down streets alone in her experience. Once she nearly fainted, kneeling against a parked car on her knees. Someone walked past several times looking at her. Did she need help? She asked for a ride to her apartment and thanked him. He said he would do it for anyone, anyone at all. Did she want to go to a hospital? No, she said, I know what I have. I have mononucleosis. Isn’t that like leukemia? Isn’t that a fatal disease, he asked. What did you say your name was? She hadn’t said her name. She wasn’t going to say her name.

— Sweethearts

The work was irradiated with sex and violence, the potential for them and the sense that at any moment one might morph into the other. The children hurting each other in the grass gestured back to the man almost hurting his lover during sex while an Argentine couple cursed each other out in the apartment overhead, and the image of those children segued into one of women running their tongues across their teeth, arousing the man watching them. Men had been writing about sex and violence forever—Genet, Burroughs, Mailer, Updike, Robert Stone—passing them back and forth like trading cards. As subject matter, sex and violence were male entitlements, as they were in life. (You know what Norman Mailer got for stabbing Adele Morales? Three years’ probation.) But here was a woman writing about them, without sentimentality or performative swagger.

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For example, Rebecca Chace’s new Substack, Hey, Friend, You Broke My Heart, whose debut essay is an unblinking account of her father’s late-life breakup with a childhood friend. Beka conceived Hey, Friend as …

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I still have the manifest of the railroad car in which my grandmother Fanya was shipped from Vienna to a destination that was ostensibly a town in Poland called Izbica but that turned out to be the death camp at Sobibor, where, since she was too old and frail to perform useful labor, she was probably killed at once. This was in 1942, more than two years…

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On consultation with a friend who teaches Latin, I think my last post should have been titled “Out of Many.”

I also worry that its moral schema was too simple, especially its binary of good and bad charisma. Look, charisma is indispensable in actors and pop stars. I doubt anyone who lacks charisma can be a pop star. (Who would that person be: the lead si…

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In recent posts on his Substack Jeff Sharlet unpacks two of the Trump administration’s propaganda videos. The first shows undocumented immigrants being shackled for an “illegal alien deportation flight,” the second, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem visiting El Savador’s CECOT megaprison where hundreds of those immigrants are now confined without trial, often without a charge except that of having entered the United States illegally. Sharlet rightly sees both videos as BDSM porn. In both the charge derives from the eroticized display of power, sexual energy transferred from sex to the secondary object— the fetish— of penal confinement.

The Noem video conforms more closely to the stereotypes of heterosexual porn, starring as it does a stereotypically hot woman with long hair spilling from under her DHS baseball cap and wearing shiny boots and what has been confirmed to be a $50,000 gold Rolex. Also possibly a push-up bra. Consider how the spot would have read if it had featured ICE chief Tom Homan.

The White House billed the shackling video as “ASMR Illegal Alien Deportation Flight”: ASMR stands for ‘autonomous sensory median response.’ People I know who watch ASMR videos, often obsessively, say they find them calming. Generally those videos feature someone whispering or having their hair gently brushed, not undocumented migrants being shackled with hardware that gets its own closeups like the jewelry in a Bulgari ad and locks with a terminal ‘snick.’ But some people may find that calming, too.

In both videos power is made manifest by the presence of human subjects: the four men handcuffed by black-gloved ICE agents, the shirtless prisoners jammed shoulder to shoulder in the cell behind the preening Secretary of DHS. None of the men is identified. Noem calls them ‘dirtbags.’ We don’t even see the faces of the ones being shuffled onto the flight. But their mute presence is essential to the spectacle of subjection. Power isn’t power unless it acts on something: the prisoners are what power acts on. They’re what power constrains, confines, transports, debases. You can think of the two videos as representing two stages in the process by which the objects of state power are stripped of personhood and compressed into a mass that serves as a backdrop for Kristi Noem’s catwalk.

There’ve been times, quite recently in our history, when the power of the state was made manifest in the ways it helped ordinary Americans: the jobless men given jobs with the WPA and the CCC under the New Deal; the Black children escorted into schools that had been shuttered against them while National Guard held back the infuriated white onlookers who would just as soon murder them; the millions of vulnerable people— vulnerable us— lining up in parking lots to have public health workers vaccinate them against a dreaded disease1 .

Even when it was waging war, the state tried to make its displays of power benign. Ads for President George W. Bush’s 2004 relection campaign showed him reviewing troops in a flight jacket but also hugging a girl whose mother had been killed at the World Trade Center on 9/11: “He’s the most powerful man in the world,” the girl said, “and all he wants is to make sure I’m safe.”

Unstated was that the most powerful man in the world was keeping that child safe by occupying a nation that had had nothing to do with her mother’s death, at the cost of at least 200,000 Iraqi dead— many of those dead being civilians— and 4, 492 U. S. servicemembers, with another 32,292 wounded.

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The campaign ad and its recasting of violence abroad as compassion at home (it was Bush or his speechwriters who gave us the term ‘armies of compassion’) say something about how America treats suffering, especially the suffering it authors and administers. Because even as a nation allocates benefits to its people— including the indirect benefits channeled through state and local governments, nonprofits, and businesses— and to people in other countries, it also inflicts suffering or allows it to be inflicted. You can speak of an economy of suffering, one that runs parallel to the money economy and is closely bound up with it but is nevertheless separate.

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This book began as an essay about the suicide of my best friend, a painter, antique-picker, and novelist named Gay Edward Milius III. At a certain point I realized that I couldn’t write that story without writing about the community in New York where he’d lived for some twenty years and where, after a valiant, failed effort to change the course of his l…

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But while in …

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I’ve spent the last five years researching and writing The Twilight of Bohemia: Westbeth and the Last Artists in New York. Westbeth is a subsidized housing complex for artists— painters, sculptors, dancers and choreographers, playwrights, actors, filmmakers, photographe…

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When I woke the other morning, I saw this on the door of the bedroom closet: a pattern of three strokes, two of them brilliant yellow, the third paler, ghostly, less an actual color than the memory of one. It took me a dazed minute before I realized that they were made by the sun streaming through a gap between the curtains on the window diagonally acro…

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In every city there are the ones who stop to give something and the ones who pass by. At different times I have been both kinds of person. Sometimes I was in a hurry. Sometimes I told myself, You can’t give to everybody. Sometimes I was so clenched with anger and self-pity that I resolved not to part with one red cent. When I was on a research trip in Kolkata, where even a casual errand brought me face to face with strangers wasted by hunger, I used to go out in the morning with ten dollars’ worth of rupees and give a little to each person who asked until the money was gone. Then I picked up my pace, my gaze lifted up to some point in the distance. One day, though, I decided that even if I wasn’t going to give something, it was cowardly not to acknowledge the people who appealed to me, and so I made a point of looking them in the eye even as I told them no. I tried to smile at them. It didn’t go over well. Those I had rejected took the eye contact as an insult, and they responded as if I had insulted them. Women with sickly babies followed me down the street, hissing. I was a rich foreigner who was mocking the old code of largesse and also the code of hard-heartedness, for the hard-hearted aren’t supposed to give you a soft look and a smile. They’re supposed to pass you by. And of course I was mocking them.

Simone Weil wrote, “Nobody is of the opinion that any man is innocent if, possessing food himself in abundance and finding someone on his doorstep three parts dead from hunger, he brushes past without giving him anything.” Maybe this is why the ones who give nothing almost always look away from those they deny. On some level, they understand they’re guilty—or, anyway, not innocent. On seeing someone I owe a debt coming toward me on the street, I take a sudden interest in the nearest shop window. I know such a model of obligation is impossibly stringent; even as I write “guilty,” a part of me bridles and grinds its teeth. But this is why most of the world’s religions have procedures for repentance and atonement. They take it as a given that people are sinful. Buddhism, more realistically, says they’re ignorant, which sounds softer until you remember that in some neighborhoods ‘ignorant’ is the worst thing you can call somebody.

Some people are so offended by the slightest imputation of guilt that they have to deflect it onto those who commit the affront of asking. They’ll only spend it on liquor. He needs to get a job. The last I heard begging on the street is a crime. Projection comes naturally when the ones asking seem to belong to a different class of humanity, disfigured by dirt and exhaustion (few people sleep well on the street), deformed by addiction or mental illness; the illness makes some of them dangerous.

The growing numbers of people reduced in this manner refute the notion that everyone in America is middle-class, or could be middle-class if they did the right thing. At a time when some Americans are spending almost half their income on housing and an unexpected illness can leave one destitute, the notion feels more and more dated, a bill so worn by its passage from hand to hand that you can no longer tell what it’s worth or where it was issued.

“To acknowledge the reality of affliction means saying to oneself: ‘I may lose at any moment, through the play of circumstances over which I have no control, anything whatsoever that I possess, including those things which are so intimately mine that I consider them as being myself. There is nothing that I might not lose.”

Weil said that, too.

Who can bear to acknowledge this? The fragility of one’s claim, the insulting ease with which it can be snatched away without anyone even remarking on it, or remarking only with scorn. People want to believe it only happens to someone else. When New Orleans was still drowning in the waters of Lake Pontchartrain, commentators were scolding its residents for not having the initiative to get out before the storm hit. Some news stations were making up stories about ‘gang-bangers’ terrorizing the Superdome. (Later it emerged that the gang-bangers were bringing water to old people and children.)

The migrants seeking refuge from crooked dictatorships and drug cartels have only to band together against the dangers of the way for those commentators and stations to speak of columns of invaders, their language a hybrid of the nomenclatures of war and pest control.

There is nothing that one might not lose.

The citizens of Los Angeles are discovering this as their city—the archetypal American city, the most sprawling, the most fun, the most existentially imperiled—burns. At this writing, some 40,000 acres, more than 12,000 structures, more than 24 dead. Those neighborhoods with the names from song lyrics: Altadena, Malibu.

Oh come on, be alive again 

Don’t lay down and die.
--Hole, "Malibu." 

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The great theme of the artists of Los Angeles has always been the unstable relation between surface and depth, the fragility of one, the bottomlessness of the other. No one understood this better than David Lynch. In the works of no artist is the surface more fragile, just paint, really, its finish already cracking. Nowhere else is the depth so imminent, just a footstep away. The severed human ear in the high grass by your house. The taxidermied robin jerkily gulping down a worm. The beatific ingenue (though her eyes are haunted) who during an audition reveals something that casts a movie set into stunned silence. The virgins warped into whoredom by evil men whose evil is completely without motive, a chthonic force that surges into them from someplace further down. You’ll never arrive at its point of origin. The shots that plunge slowly into the lights of the hills, the canyons between buildings, the black inside of a box that once held something that can’t be named.

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Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed (I Promessi Sposi) is widely considered the great Italian novel of the 19th century, Italy’s counterpart to Les Miserables, which Victor Hugo wrote in roughly the same period. My Italian friends remember reading it in high school; none have revisited it. A great book may be one that people read once because they have t…

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