n+1

Santa Lucia

2013-05-24T16:25:52Z

by Olivia Clare

Edward drives Nola to the west edge of town, skidding, almost purposefully, down unplowed, unlit streets. He turns onto the main street—lit hotels, coffeehouses, a bookstore selling two of his books. For driving in winter, he wears a badger fur hat that matches his beard, and he’s petting her ear, so small it’s almost nothing.

There’s a public garden, dense with roses in spring and summer, a cast stone fountain, and then a foreclosed house not lived in for years. They’ve passed it many times; this is when Nola invents something for him.

She says, “You know who lived there.”

He says, “No.”

“The town witch.”

“Is that right.”

“Oh, yes. She grew trees with poison berries. All the birds died. She made pies and gave them to her neighbors.”

“She didn’t bring me any pies,” he says.

“That’s because this was too long ago,” Nola says. “Before you were born. She would have liked you, though, I think.”

Despite Edward’s distaste for the cliché of the professor-student romance, he’s thirty-two years older than Nola, whom he met last spring in his undergraduate seminar on the 19th-century novel. She graduated in May.

“Are you coming over?” he says.

“I want to.”

He lives in a house he bought with his first wife, when he smoked in his study and ashed on his lectures, lectures he cared for, boxes of them, hadn’t he? He has a daughter, just here at Thanksgiving, studying law in California, the daughter of his second wife Christina, Christina who’d turned slightly maniacal, the descendant of suicidal Spanish rich.

On his desk are the stacked Russian hardbacks, frigid Cyrillic he’s read with his not quite prizewinning mind. There’s a photograph here of his mother. China-cut eyes flecked with Spain. Postcards from Christina. In the kitchen, Ivan the White barks to be let into the yard full of frosted pyracantha stems and thorns.

“He needs to quit,” Edward says. “I’m not chasing him again.”

“You’re both very bad,” Nola says.

They’ve gone up the stairs. The housekeeper’s made his bed. The room, with its corner lamps and heirloom armoire, has a carpet badly damaged by the dog. Now it’s snowing harder, the window an off-white screen. They’ve established an order to this. She lies on her stomach, a short while for him to get hard, a short while to come. Afterwards he makes a little joke, one line, meaningless, to indicate they’ve shifted from whatever world of primate ritual into another of comfortable, unextraordinary postcoital lightness. He half-sleeps for ten minutes; she’s in the tub. By the time he takes her home, his breath is an old man’s.

+ + +

She cracks her knuckles in what he thinks of as little carvings of sound, delicate, swift, a pianist preparing to practice, and he tells her so.

“I ordered too much food,” he says now. “You’ll take some with you.”

“We’ll see.”

“Sure you will.”

In an act of mild perversion, he’s invited her to lunch at the faculty club, knowing it becomes, this time of day, a haunt of his department. It’s an old-fashioned banquet room with gloved waiters carrying trays of pastry and silver teapots in priestly silence.

“I can’t force myself to do things I’m not good at, like play piano,” she says. “That’s what you’re supposed to say’s the trouble with my generation, right?”

Her youth, her trump, but she worries her precocity has only a few more years, that in order to act older, one must be young.

“Don’t feed me more,” she says.

“It’s plump you have, not fat. Mere plump. Squirrels pack away for the winter. I’m not complaining. We’ll eat the crabs, and you take home the lamb.”

The department’s fellows and one new hire, insular as a Greek chorus, sit at a nearby round table and glance over intermittently. Nola holds her palm above the table’s candle. Sleet mud streaks the ankles of her stockings. A short solemn skirt. A plastic barrette. In certain moments, he’s convinced she needs gifts. Last year, he bought her a computer, a set of dishes, many books . . . because he is, almost certainly, taking something from her, a little youth, a few of her twenty-two years, along with her unironic inquisitiveness, for which he implicitly asks, and reverence. Reverence he seems to return. He knows the union consummates his narcissism, his unspoken belief he is not the age he appears. She mirrors his true age, his untrue age. He tells himself he most admires her strangeness, which he tells himself he’s not invented.

“I had this colleague (he’s dead now, but he would have liked you),” he says. “He was in Political Science. He hated this place, but he always ordered crab and lamb.”

“I thought it was a weird combination.”

“I think of it as a memorial.”

How will she sit on the bus after this, what will she do in her apartment? When will you nap, play with your cat, who’s “shy and doesn’t like men.” I don’t believe you. You’ll eat the lamb as soon as you’re home; you eat even more than Christina. You eat rolls and butter like an orphan from Dickens.

“Why would your friend like me who died?”

“He had exceptional taste; it’s why we were friends.”

She knows how he thinks of her, and this is what she takes from him—his myth of her, his subtle romanticization that cements her self-assurance. She hated Edward’s class; it was trite, and he too tired of it quickly. On her first paper he’d written, “Adept.”

She says, “You only talk about dead people.”

“I don’t like to gossip.”

Remnants of snow dissolve in the carpet. Some snow still at the ends of Nola’s hair, black, from her Italian father. She’s cracking her knuckles again, quick hands, nothing like Christina’s.

“Tell me about your witch,” he says. “I like stories while I eat.”

“But we aren’t driving.”

“Pretend. I suppose she’s lovely?”

“Well I wouldn’t be surprised.”

“What’s her coloring?”

“Edward.” It’s Charlie, his department chair, elected to that rank for his malleability, standing at their table like a well-bred dog in a suit. “Hello, Nola. Edward, I thought you hated the food here.” He says this quietly.

“It’s the only kind I can eat. I need bland food, my doctor says. No spice, no salt.”

“Can we have a talk sometime?” says Charlie. His little suit is brown, old-fashioned. “Today, maybe. It isn’t about yesterday.”

“Which was embarrassing for everyone. We’ve got to have a real agenda at meetings.” This comes out sterner than Edward meant, but he likes it and makes his hand into a fist on the table. “Some of us were just sitting there wondering what was happening.”

Charlie looks at the new hire and fellows, sitting with some composure as two waiters serve many plates of food.

“I agree,” says Charlie. “And I’m working on it. Anyway, there’s something else we need to discuss. Can you come to my office later? Or maybe we’ll talk at the Lucy party. You’re coming, aren’t you? It’s set to snow four more inches tonight.”

“I’ll see you tonight.”

“All right, let’s talk then. Goodbye, Nola.” Charlie walks to the fellows’ table, who lay down their forks to greet him.

“What’s a Lucy party?”

“Nothing important.”

“I thought it was a Christmas party we were going to. What’s he going to talk to you about?”

“Spenserians are fastidious. Stay away from them. Charlie’s a fucking prince.”

“Who’s he fucking?” And it comes out wrong, the last word awkward, so she folds her hands on the table.

+ + +

She doesn’t take the bus—he drives her to the bookstore, promising to pick her up at her apartment for the party later. Crab and lamb swing in a bag in her hand as she wipes her boots on a mat. “That’s weird,” she says, as the door shuts behind her. “I just saw your father.”

“Not weird.” Charlie’s son, usually away at a small, isolated New England college similar to this one, stands just now at the front of the long store with a red winter nose and a graphic novel.

He lacks his father’s obsequious habits, Charlie’s little bows during greetings, his nods and demonstrative eyebrows. She’s met him several times, most recently two years ago at a fraternity party when he introduced himself as Craig and his friend as Schindler.

“Nola, is it right?” he says.

“Mm-hm.”

“You look much older than last time I saw you.”

“Colder?” she says.

“OK, why not? You were graduating. So was my sister. I sat next to your parents.”

“I know, they told me about you.”

“Sure. I remember that day because I gave my sister a flower necklace to wear—a real flower necklace that I’d just made of the wild flowers I’d picked on the way to the auditorium, you know, a nice gift, I thought—and it was so hot that day that the flowers melted down the front of her dress. Of course she wore white because she reads stacks of wedding magazines, and so her dress was stained orange from the flowers. It sounds rather pretty, but she didn’t think so. She thought it was one of my little jokes.”

His frugal smile contrasts with his long story, and he’s looking at the buttons of her coat while the windows rattle from the wind, which has chilled her ears and mouth into what Edward calls “frozen treats.”

“What book is that?”

“Just rubbish,” he says.

“I like graphic novels. Well, a little,” Nola says. “Only if they’re well done.”  “That’s easy. I like almost anything well done. But people read these for the wrong reasons. Your friend agrees. Ask him.”

It’s an invitation, or even a faint request, to know more about her understanding with Edward (as if she might answer, “We don’t talk about books, we just screw”), but with anyone, friends, Edward’s colleagues, it remains her poker hand, not to be shared.

“Are you going to your father’s party?”

“His Lucy party?” He says it slowly. “I could show up. I don’t know. I’ve been around those people most of my life. To be blunt, I think my father doesn’t want you there.”

“That’s not what I was told.”

“Suit yourself. I might be going to a house party on Hoffman.”

“House parties in this town are ‘rubbish.’”

“Yes, well, we should meet up. I’m friends with lots of professors’ kids, you know. We’ve got a merry little gang. They’d probably like you. Anyway, we all come in for winter break, only I’m back a little early. Nobody knows that yet.”

He’s been tapping the toe of his boot against the bookshelf, making little scuffs at the bottom of the blond wood. He’s shorter than Edward and more animated, in small ways.

“By the way, don’t tell my father you saw me here.”

“In town?”

“Of course he knows I’m in town. I live with him. Just don’t tell him I was at the bookstore. I’m not ever supposed to be here.”

“What? Why can’t you be at the bookstore?”

“Long story,” rubbing his weak beard.

+ + +

Charlie’s house—cold floors, dark shellac, art deco mirrors. A square table in the hall with a bowl of Brazil nuts, bottles of rum and wine. Roman faces Eric, who leans on the back of a chair on which three small tabbies sleep in curled nines and sixes.

“Why not?” Roman’s unzipping his jacket, taking off his hat. His hair went white a few years ago. “I’m going to bring it up next Tuesday. I mean, no one’s stopping what’s-her-name from teaching a whole course on—”

“You know her name,” says Eric. He’s a short man in a saggy pants and shirt. He’s known Roman since he started teaching, years before.

“If Amy insists on teaching a whole course on—”

“You mean Sex and—”

“—television, then why not? She told me she received an undie paper, a—she said—‘delicious paper’ linking cunnilingus, Woolf’s hemline, and the eyesight of Milton’s daughters . . . Besides, Jesus, look. Look at that. Edward’s undie has nothing but cookies on her plate.”

Nola’s at the dining room table—spiced apples, apple candles, turkey, glazed ham, stuffing with apricots, miniature truffles, Scottish tea.

“She’s graduated,” Eric says.

“All that’s going straight to her rear.”

Nola passes the bathroom, inside which, unknown to her, Edward, having urinated, out of a hypochondriacal habit he now frequently indulges, inspects his penis, but nothing is ever unusual, in spite of his having taken chances. Maybe he should get married. Once, between his first and second marriages, while sleeping intermittently with a colleague, a pimple caused weeks of loss of appetite. When his longtime physician and college friend refused to take a sample, claiming the mumpy bump was too small to concern him, Edward shouted something to the effect of, “millions of angels might in fact copulate on the head of a pin.”

In Charlie’s living room, a large, red-faced man with tartan socks holds a plate of turkey and ham on his lap and a cranberry in his cheek. One of two women in wobbly, doll-like chairs turns to Nola.

“You came with Edward, right?”

“Yes.”

“Charlie invited you? I’m Molly, Eric’s wife. This is Katherine.”

“It’s so cold in here,” Katherine says, hunching, pushing her skirt down over her knees. There are dark red veins in her eyes.

“And I’ve got some kind of cramp. Excuse me, but I do,” says Molly. She overpronounces her words, as if giving a slight performance for Nola.

“Christ, how weird,” says Katherine. “I have a cramp, too. I wonder if it could be that our cycles are aligned.”

“I don’t know but I’m ready for the Lucy rolls.”

“What’s Lucy?” Nola says.

“It’s Charlie’s Lucy party,” says Molly. She looks like she might say something else but then finishes her eggnog and places the glass between her knees. She buttons the top button of her sweater.

“What’s a Lucy party?”

“Saint Lucy. Nola, sit down,” Molly says. “We’re curious about Edward—he’s very unpredictable, we think.”

From the corner, a 75-year-old Chaucer scholar Nola didn’t notice clears her throat in two ascending notes, the second with a slightly whimsical adornment, while holding her mouth in a curious bassoonist’s embouchure, her tensed cheeks powdered skull-white. Saint-Saens’ “The Dying Swan” plays on the stereo. The red-faced man with tartan socks looks up.

“I drink tea,” the Chaucerian says. “It’s full of antioxidants.”

The man nods politely.

“I’d love tea if I didn’t drink it every day,” she says. “But I drink it every day because I like it so much.” Sipping eggnog from a china cup, her mouth gives way to slight spasms at its corners; anyone who knew her well might think she seemed unusually tired or clumsy tonight.

“That’s very true, Diana,” Katherine says a little loudly, with unintended condescension, as if speaking to a great-aunt from whom one stands to inherit a small house or large jewel.

“The paintings are awful.” Molly gives a little hissing sound. She squeezes the tassels of her scarf, and wraps the whole scarf around her neck. “But I’m not going to say that to Charlie. It would hurt him. I wonder if he has some kind of muscle relaxer. I really do have a cramp.”

+ + +

Nola walks by a side table with a photo of Charlie’s son in profile, his nose pointed toward the constellation of wary new fellows and their husbands. She enters the screened-off patio. She would like to have the gothically slanted mind Edward says she has . . . she tries to think of descending lines of snow as lines of spells and chants.

“Hello.” Roman’s out here smoking in a wicker chair. He’s wearing a T-shirt. He’s stuck his long legs out so that Nola must walk over his feet to the other side of the patio. “Are you eating? What good things Charlie has. I like turkey very much. Do you?”

“I do,” she says.

“Oh, you do?” He’s encouraged. “You like turkey?”

“Yes, with stuffing.”

“I like stuffing. All that with rum. Dark, Christmas rum sent down from Jesus. Cookies, you like those?”  “You sound like Edward,” she says.

“What about . . . bread and butter?” Roman sits up in his chair.

“Bread with butter?”

“It’s simple, I know, but it’s overlooked. I try not to overlook anything.”

Edward’s at the doorway. “I didn’t know you were out here. Aren’t you cold?”

“We were just talking about our favorite foods,” Roman says.

“Foods?” Edward comes to Nola and says the word softly, drowsily, resolving to take her home soon.

“Nola seems to like all foods equally,” Roman says.

“I didn’t say that,” Nola says.

“No? I thought you did.”

“This is an odd misunderstanding,” Edward says.

“There’s no such thing as an odd misunderstanding,” Roman replies. No such thing as a normal one.”

“Roman—”

“We were having a conversation, and I don’t even like conversation.”

“Doing all right?” Edward talks in her ear. She’s a year younger than his daughter, similar in a few ways—occasional reclusiveness and frequent feigned naiveté. In certain self-indulgent moods, he imagines Nola descends from a line of fertile women; her body looks as though it can withstand a “decadent brute” (what he once called himself in a letter to an old friend) or a mythical, near-fatal fall. At night, she has a newness, a satin-like, alien sheen to her back, her face. “To turn a strange woman over then/ over again/ in your head . . .” What poet said that, and what student had called the poet chauvinistic in class, only to be shocked to learn the poet was a woman? “Still. A chauvinist,” the student had said.

“Edward.” Charlie’s at the porch door. He’s in the same brown suit as before. “Hello, Nola. Roman. Edward, I need to speak with you,” working his jowls, “Let’s come inside.”

“Not tonight,” Edward says. “I’m feeling a little funny just now.”

“I don’t mind leaving early,” Nola says.

“Charlie,” Roman says, “that meeting the other day. It was. . .not to be repeated, as far as I’m concerned.”

“Well I’ve spoken with Edward about it, haven’t I?” Charlie says. “Spoken with a few others. We’ll figure it out. Edward, let’s come inside and talk.”

“Charlie, what is this?” Eric shouts from the house.

“That isn’t the point,” says Roman.

“Charlie?” Eric shouts from inside the house. “Where’d you get this?”

“Let’s go in.” Edward takes Nola’s elbow. “You coming?”

“In a minute,” she says. “Should we go soon?”

“I’m fine,” Edward says. “Just very tired.”

“Hey, Charlie!” Eric says. Come in here a second!”

Eric’s in the dining room, a plate of food in his hand. He’s in front of a shelf the length of the wall, examining an antique pistol in a faux velvet cushioned case with a glass hatch.

“It’s a funny thing for you to have,” says Eric.

“It came from my grandfather’s farm in Pennsylvania,” Charlie says, extracting the pistol from its transparent coffin. “I asked for it when he died.” Edward takes the gun in his one drinkless hand and grasps the barrel tighter than he intends.

“I’ve heard about these Pennsylvania farms,” says Roman. “I knew a man who had one, in fact. On a Pennsylvania farm, you’ve got to have a certain number of animals to have the privilege of calling it a farm. You’ve got to have that amount. No matter what. So this man I knew lived in New York. He hired a couple of ne’er-do-wells to look after his Pennsylvania farm. A couple of rascals, a couple of punks. I met these guys in Pennsylvania.”

“You met these guys?” Eric inserts an entire dreidel-shaped cookie into his mouth, chewing it quickly while readying his right hand with another from his plate.

“I spent a weekend there. Anyway, there were these punks looking after this farm, but there weren’t enough animals. Now the man with the property—this was a smart man, a lawyer in New York—needed a farm for tax purposes. So how do you think he did it? How did he have enough animals, and with these ne’er-do-wells who could hardly take care of themselves?”

Katherine leads Diana, shuffling clumsily, toward the bathroom.

“Goodness, a gun,” says Diana. Her long skirt’s stained with cranberry. “No, I don’t feel well at all. Not one minute of it or any of them.”

“Please, it would be a good idea to calm down,” says Katherine. She’s dabbing at Diana’s skirt with a red, crumpled napkin as they walk. Katherine’s eyes are hazy, without focus. She shuts the bathroom door.

“Enter the goats,” says Edward.

“Not goats,” Roman says. “How do you think the lawyer did it?”

“Hired more ne’er do wells,” says Eric. “Humans are animals.”

“Rabbits.” Roman’s already puggy eyes become puggier. “Rabbits.”

Edward finds himself fixated on the stripes on Roman’s sleeve. “Where the hell did you get that shirt?”

“What do you mean?” says Roman. “This is my boring shirt.”

“Before I forget,” says Charlie. “Time for these.” He uncovers a tray of saffron rolls. “Lussekatt, Lucy buns. I made these. We’re a week early now for Saint Lucy’s Day, but that doesn’t matter.”

“It occurs to me,” says Roman, with a slow lilt. “Every year we have little Lucy buns, but aren’t we supposed to have a procession? With a little Lucy to lead us? Charlie, you’re the mongrel half-Swede, isn’t that what’s done?”

“Yes, there’s a Lucy,” Charlie says. “She wears a crown with candles.”

“Well it’s our first Lucy party,” says Roman, “where I believe we have a Lucy, gentlemen.”

“That isn’t a good idea.” Charlie pulls apart an S-shaped roll and squeezes it nervously into his mouth.

“Roman,” says Edward very loudly, sloshing a bit of the nog from his cup, the new hire and her husband looking over. “That’s not the point. I’m talking about your shirt.”

“Are you all right?” Charlie asks.

“I don’t sleep well.” Edward says.

“Charlie,” says Roman. “You ought to be grateful. We finally have Lucy. She’s out on the porch.”

“I’ll get her,” says Eric.

“As long as nobody sings,” Edward says. “I don’t want anyone to sing.” His thoughts feel clear, yet he watches Roman’s shirt make kaleidoscopic patterns, dizzying arrays of stained glass petals.

Having lapsed into an ethereal quiet on the porch, Nola enters on Eric’s unsteady arm, her eyes a little electric from the cold, her face mottled with a damp red prettiness.

“Nola,” says Roman. “Charlie’s people are Swedes, and in a week it’s Saint Lucy’s Day. You’re our Lucy.”

“I know,” she says. “I don’t really want to.”

“I told her.” Eric stumbles on a furry cat toy.

“Lucy was a virgin, they took her eyes out with a fork, and so we drink,” says Roman. All right, now what you’re going to do is walk around in a circle while we sing. Eric was a chorus boy, an asthmatic chorus boy, but nevertheless. So, Nola, walk all around. There you are. We don’t have any candles. Charlie, start singing?”

“I don’t want Charlie to sing,” says Edward.

“No thank you, Roman,” Charlie says.

“But what are the words?” Roman says.

“I remember,” says Eric.

Edward bites a saffron roll and suffers “Santa Lucia” sung in Eric’s countertenor, while the flame of the lighter Roman’s given to Nola to hold is another stained glass petal with something not right at the center of it. Nola walks the perimeter of the room, laughing a little.

“Roman, you sing, too,” Eric says.

“No thanks. Quite winded.”

“All of us,” Edward says. “Sit down.”

“Edward, please.” Charlie takes Edward’s arm. “Edward, come now. Time for our talk.”

They go, coatless, through the porch door, under bare branches, into the snow, not vanishing as it hits the ground, but the flakes seem to turn upon themselves, small pointed wheels, each one too large to be real, melting a little, strobing, hemorrhaging points of water from its angles. Edward no longer feels drunk; this is something else, more severe. In the house what sounds like a wineglass breaks.

“What was that?” Charlie says.

“Not your pistol.”

“Edward, I’ve been wanting us to talk. You can probably guess what it is.” Charlie walks ahead to a shrub covered in long flanks of snow and stops, and Edward sways as he walks in what he perceives as a straight line in swaying grass.

“No, Charlie,” says Edward. “I wanted to talk to you.”

“Oh?”

“Charles, what’s this?” He points to Charlie’s head.

“What’s what?”

“It isn’t even your color. It isn’t even yours.”

“What’s wrong with you?”

“Right there. I guess I have to try to pull it off.” With spread hands, he grabs Charlie’s head, as if to heal a sinner at an evangelical revival.

“Edward, really, what the hell?”

Edward lurches back. Human shadows cartwheel on the snow in purplish parabolas beyond the shrub, which seems to Edward to suddenly melt in time-lapse. Charlie is talking. Edward sprints to the house. There are yelps from the house.

“They’re spotted. It’s just bad art.” At the center of a small crowd, Molly makes large, vague swipes at each hand with its opposite. Her sweater’s on the floor. Both straps of her dress have fallen from her shoulders. “Eric, let’s go. Let’s go. Let’s go. Let’s go.”

“Molly! Molly, you’re hysterical.” Eric whispers in her ear. “I need you to put your cup down.”

“Little bits of cinnamon, I swear. I tried to lick them off at first, didn’t I, Katherine? Katherine?” Molly begins to weep. “What ages me?”

Nola looks at her own hands. Several freckles. “Edward,” she says.

“Eric, do you feel alright?” Charlie asks.

“I’m fine.”

“Who the Jesus put so many mirrors in this house?” says Roman. “Fifty, forty-nine, forty-eight, forty-seven . . . It’s like an orgy in here, so many redundant bodies, no sex. But never the sex. Never the sex? Christ, something’s finally wrong with me.”

“Roman, please,” Charlie says. What in God’s name is happening here? What’s wrong with Edward?”

“Strange cock. Very strange cock. I swear it isn’t even yours.”

Everyone looks at Charlie, except the fellows and the new hire, and their three husbands, the six of them standing together, largely mute, until the new hire’s husband, a young, stooped man, after looking around the room as if for a bit of confidence, raises his right arm triumphantly and shouts, “My ribs are swollen!”

“I know what I smell—it’s opopanax!” says Edward. He attempts to unzip Nola’s purse, hanging from her shoulder.

“Someone’s put LSD in the eggnog,” says the husband with swollen ribs.

“Christ, he’s right,” says Roman. “It’s fucking LSD. I said this eggnog tasted shit-like.”

“Calm down, please.” Charlie’s holding Edward by the wrist. “Nobody’s spiked your eggnog.”

“LSD! It’s LSD. I’m a fucking kid again. In the middle of the living room.” Molly sits on the sofa, crying with both hands over her mouth.

“You’re insane,” Charlie says. You think there’s LSD?”

“Look at all these jerks with cups of nog,” Roman says.

The bathroom door slams open. “I’m taking Diana to the hospital,” says Katherine. Someone needs to come help me with her. Eric. Do you hear me? Diana’s in the bathroom. Eric.”

“Jesus Christ,” says Charlie, watching Molly try to stand up. “Jesus Christ, my son. My son. He thinks I won’t have him arrested.”

The Saint-Saens recording restarts, and the man in the tartan socks, now alone in the living room, with a new plate of turkey and ham, says, “My first wife used to love this piece.”

+ + +

Nola’s never driven his car before tonight. Edward takes his badger hat from the glove box and reclines his passenger seat. The roads are full of coarse tracks of snow.

“Your hair is my wires.” He puts on his hat.

“Close your eyes,” she says. “Lie back down.”

“Your eyes are witch way hazel. Your witch with berries.”

“But I’m not the witch,” she says.

“I want to tell you what I’m seeing right now.”

“Tell me.”

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The Uncertainty of Risk

2013-05-22T16:53:36Z

by Nick Werle

Silver, Nate. The Signal and The Noise. Penguin. September 2012.
Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. Antifragile. Random House. November 2012.
Weatherall, James Owen. The Physics of Wall Street Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. January 2013.

No one could have predicted on March 10, 2011 that the imminent Tōhoku earthquake, at magnitude 9.0, would be the greatest to hit Japan, or foreseen the giant tsunami that struck the Japanese coast minutes later. But that does not mean the subsequent meltdown of three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station was unavoidable. The plant was built to withstand a big earthquake and survive a moderately sized tsunami, but a panoply of engineering errors—too-short sea walls, backup diesel generators installed in locations likely to flood, pools overcrowded with spent fuel rods, and a main control room insufficiently shielded against radiation—permitted the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl. While Japanese nuclear regulators and TECPO, the utility that owns Fukushima Daiichi, knew that many of these vulnerabilities existed, the authorities’ sophisticated geophysical models considered such an intense earthquake to be impossible in the region. Their risk analyses did not account for the simultaneous, systemic failures of sea walls, power grids, and backup cooling systems that ultimately doomed the plant.

Increasingly, risk management experts and their predictive models of the world determine the “efficient” distribution of resources necessary to respond to existential threats. In some domains, this organizational strategy has worked well. Improvements in prediction have helped save lives from extreme weather, manage the spread of seasonal disease, and navigate the internet. But forecasting has not adequately protected against the ravages of catastrophic technological failure, ecological collapse, or financial panic. Despite our generalized faith in their power to predict, when systemic disaster strikes we continue to accept experts’ claims that the cataclysm was an unforeseeable “act of god” that no one could have reasonably prepared for. These excuses leave both the ideology and the techniques of risk management intact. Our success at forecasting which cities to evacuate in advance of an approaching hurricane convinces us that we can equally well predict a “sustainable” level of carbon emissions that will head off global climate change. But this extrapolation overestimates our ability to statistically manage reality’s irreducible complexity and to eliminate uncertainty. The result is a world well prepared for the regularly occurring dangers of modern life, but woefully fragile to the rare, extreme events that drive history.

The uncertainty of the future is a truth that applies equally well across the broadest range of human experience. By constructing sophisticated models of reality, experts can make valid, probabilistic predictions about the future, transforming unknowable uncertainty into calculated risks. If an individual rationally prepares for the risks he faces, the thinking goes, then things will turn out all right over the long run. If everyone properly accounts for his own risks, then this protection will extend to society as a whole—since this view sees society as nothing but a large number of individuals and firms. Digital communication, social networks, and computers’ algorithmic autonomy—the elements of Big Data—only reinforce the view that emergent behavior allows a large group of rational actors to be self-regulating. As the accuracy of these individuals’ models of reality improves, so should the efficient self-management of the whole. But this ideology relies on a fallacy of composition, since it assumes that a whole system behaves no differently than the sum of its parts. There is no room in this neoliberal view for the “rational irrationality” of bank runs, asset bubbles, and other nonlinear combinations of effects that emerge in complex, self-interacting systems. There is no way for risk managers to prepare for a catastrophe when their science denies its possibility.

The financial industry suffers (or gains, depending on who you’re talking to) from this overoptimistic commitment to computational risk management more than any other industry. In The Physics of Wall Street, James Owen Weatherall chronicles the evolving quantitative models of financial markets, from the 19th-century Parisian bourse to the postmodern exchanges composed of “co-located” servers, submitting and canceling bids and offers thousands of times a second on the orders of proprietary trading algorithms. The book presents physicists-turned-quants as heroes of financial markets, and argues that the 2008 financial crisis demonstrates the need for even more of their sophisticated risk modeling, since the reigning models were clearly insufficient. In keeping with this political objective, Weatherall rarely judges the social value of the models he profiles by their historical effects on real markets. He prefers instead to explain why their theories are theoretically correct, recounting the billions they have made their makers on trading floors.

Weatherall’s treatment of the Black-Scholes options pricing model demonstrates these problems. This equation puts a price on risk in the form of a financial derivative, a contractual bet intended to offset the risk of owning an underlying asset. Weatherall describes how Fischer Black, Myron Scholes, and their collaborator Robert Merton came up with a method of constructing a “risk-free” portfolio of securities, derivatives, and cash, just as the SEC approved the opening of the first dedicated options market in the US, creating an immediate demand among traders for a way to price these derivatives. Black, Scholes, and Merton didn’t just publish their model, for which they won the 1997 Nobel Prize. They took it to the markets themselves. Scholes and Merton went on to be directors of Long Term Capital Management (LTCM), a hedge fund that billed itself as “the financial technology company” and based its supposedly risk-free arbitrage trading on “dynamic hedging” strategies derived from the Black-Scholes model. Black, who died in 1995, created the Quantitative Strategies Group at Goldman Sachs.

In The Physics of Wall Street, Weatherall deems the Black-Scholes model successful because traders and hedge funds adopted it with zeal. He acknowledges that it has some limitations, and that the model’s widespread use likely exacerbated the 1987 Black Monday stock market crash. But he maintains that it is “based on rigorous reasoning that, in a very real sense, cannot be wrong.” Of course, this limited, methodological assessment both ignores the model’s theoretical problems and glosses over the real structural damage it has caused. Although he extols LTCM’s performance during its first few years, when it posted annual returns of more than 40 percent, Weatherall only spends a few sentences on the firm’s spectacular implosion in 1998, when it lost $4.6 billion in four months as its “risk-free” dynamic hedging strategy turned out not to have eliminated uncertainty after all. Even though the Black-Scholes model dictated that the firm’s arbitrage trades were “correct” in the long term, it failed to heed the maxim that markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. It was not only LTCM’s directors who were in thrall to the firm’s “financial technology.” Nearly every bank on Wall Street had eagerly extended large credit lines to the hedge fund, trusting its team of Nobel prizewinners and trading veterans. As LTCM’s highly leveraged bets on foreign debt soured, the financial system itself might have crumbled under the weight of billions in worthless repo financing had the Federal Reserve not organized a bailout.

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At the foundation of many financial models, including Black-Scholes, is an assumption that price changes in financial markets conform to a version of the normal distribution—the probabilistic description behind the familiar bell curve. The normal distribution describes the well-behaved randomness of a coin flip or the heights of a population of adults, and its familiarity has bred a wide array of mathematical tools to manipulate it. This tractability is the primary motivation for modelers’ application of it, but in reality the model is abused, invoked to explain phenomena that don’t conform to its convenient pattern. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, an options trader-turned-philosopher, has labored to explain how nearly all risk models misunderstand the nature of randomness by overeagerly assuming that all sorts of phenomena can be described with the well-behaved normal distribution model. As a consequence, our faith in risk management and its experts has left society vulnerable to the hazards of uncertainty.

In his 2007 bestseller, The Black Swan, Taleb argued that there are really two broad categories of randomness. The tame randomness of the normal distribution is dominated by the law of large numbers, which states that collecting more samples of a random phenomenon should give statisticians a more precise measure of its average behavior and more accurate inferences about its underlying causes. In this regime, more data is always better, extreme cases are vanishingly rare, and a single sample never disrupts the overall picture: even if his existence were possible, a nine-foot-tall man would not change the average height of New Yorkers. But few economic phenomena are so well behaved. Instead, their probability distributions have “fat tails,” meaning rare, extreme events dominate the picture and average values are meaningless. Consider the distribution of income: the average income of Americans may have grown in the “recovery” year of 2010, but since 93 percent of that gain went to the top 1 percent, the average does not truthfully portray economic reality. Similarly, financial markets are dominated by Taleb’s “Black Swans,” extreme events that one cannot predict on the basis of past data. A single downturn could erase the wealth and power that Lehman Brothers’ investment bank accumulated over 158 years, imperiling the global economy in the process. Taleb shows how, in the complex systems that give rise to this wild randomness, minute differences in assumptions and current measurements can change the predicted frequency and intensity of Black Swans by as much as one trillion times. It’s therefore fundamentally impossible to reliably estimate either how often Black Swans will appear or how destructive they will be.

Benoît Mandelbrot, the brilliant mathematician of fractal fame, first presented evidence that financial markets are wildly random back in the 1960s. But these empirical studies failed to convince the financiers and their econometricians, who to this day continue to model markets using variants of the too-tame normal distribution, largely because of its correspondence with neoclassical ideas about efficient markets free from irrational booms and busts. Belief in these discredited theories runs so deep that no amount of contradictory evidence can dislodge them. Despite the too-high frequency of large booms and panics, financiers continue to invoke the normal distribution’s language of sigmas (standard deviations) to assure everyone that their risk is properly managed. LTCM’s 1998 risk management reports stated that it would take a virtually impossible “10-sigma” event for the firm to lose all of its capital within one year (and according to the normal distribution, a 10-sigma event should happen once in every 10²⁴ samples, a number ten million times larger than the number of seconds since the Universe began). During the crisis of 2008, David Viniar, CFO of Goldman Sachs, explained his bank’s extraordinary losses by claiming it was blindsided by “twenty-five standard deviation moves, several days in a row.” The obvious implication of statements like these is that financial crises are unforeseeable “acts of God” for which no one should be expected to prepare. History suggests otherwise.

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Beyond Wall Street, too, persistent faith in prediction models continues to dominate, as people remain optimistic that information density and supercomputing power of “Big Data” will allow scientists to model ever-larger chunks of the world and manage the risks presented by its intrinsic randomness. In The Signal and the Noise, Nate Silver explains why the profusion of data, theories, and computing power so often fails to open the future to inspection. The mild-mannered Silver has become a statistical guru by bringing rigorous Bayesian thinking to fields already drowning in statistics. In The Signal and The Noise, he describes how he used his spare time to build PECOTA, a statistical model that predicted the possible future performance of a baseball prospect by comparing his record to a database of past players’ stats. Silver’s jump into stardom came during the seemingly interminable 2008 presidential campaign, when he started mining mountains of polling data on his anonymously published blog, FiveThirtyEight. His detailed model of the race correctly predicted the general election results in forty-nine of the fifty states, outperforming both political graybeards and established polling firms. He repeated the trick again for the 2012 race, this time as a staffer at the New York Times, correctly calling all nine swing states and thirty-one of the thirty-three senate races.

The advent of cheap computing power has improved the reliability of some, but not all, types of predictions. Twenty-five years ago, the National Hurricane Center’s forecasts of a hurricane’s landfall three days out had a radius of uncertainty of 350 miles. Today, that error is down to 100 miles, an area small enough to effectively evacuate and harden. Weather forecasts rely on simulations of the atmosphere, built from equations representing well-understood physical laws and measurements of current conditions. These equations have proven highly reliable over decades, and advances in satellite and radar technology provide meteorologists with increasingly accurate and fine-grained data. Since doubling the resolution of these models requires a sixteen-fold increase in the number of calculations, computational capacity substantially limits predictive accuracy. Supercomputers help here.

But computer power can’t make up for faulty theory or poor quality data. A fundamental challenge facing modelers is that in most cases they can see only the effects of a random phenomenon, not the underlying processes that generate it. In cases of wild randomness, relying on computers to squeeze inferences from limited data sets leads experts to confidently discount the possibility of future black swans, which in turn encourages decision makers to over-optimize and reduce margins of safety too far. Silver demonstrates how competition among data-driven experts to produce “precise” forecasts for their consumers leads experts to try to reduce the uncertainty reported alongside their predictions. In doing so, analysts tend to “overfit” their models to more closely follow the contours of the available data. While this strategy might reduce the margins of error in their reports, it also yields models that judge events more extreme than those present in their source data to be virtually impossible. For businesses and regulators eager to keep compliance costs low, these truncated forecasts are often welcome news.

Consider the engineering and regulatory failures responsible for the Fukushima Daiichi meltdowns. After the shaking from the Tōhoku earthquake reached the plant, its three active reactors shut down as designed. The cooling system, a massive system of pumping equipment preventing the reactors and their spent fuel rods from melting, could no longer get electricity from the grid and so began drawing power from emergency generators, many of which were located in basements. When the forty-nine-foot tsunami waves reached the oceanfront plant fifty minutes after the quake, they crashed over the nineteen-foot seawalls, drowning the generators and destroying substations necessary to distribute power throughout the six-reactor complex. Without an operational cooling system, the reactors and pools overstuffed with spent fuel rods overheated and ignited a further series of catastrophic failures.

Risk management failed on several levels at Fukushima Daiichi. Both TEPCO and its captured regulator bear responsibility. First, highly tailored geophysical models predicted an infinitesimal chance of the region suffering an earthquake as powerful as the Tōhoku quake. This model uses historical seismic data to estimate the local frequency of earthquakes of various magnitudes; none of the quakes in the data was bigger than magnitude 8.0. Second, the plant’s risk analysis did not consider the type of cascading, systemic failures that precipitated the meltdown. TEPCO never conceived of a situation in which the reactors shut down in response to an earthquake, and a tsunami topped the seawall, and the cooling pools inside the reactor buildings were overstuffed with spent fuel rods, and the main control room became too radioactive for workers to survive, and damage to local infrastructure delayed reinforcement, and hydrogen explosions breached the reactors’ outer containment structures. Instead, TEPCO and its regulators addressed each of these risks independently and judged the plant safe to operate as is.

This piecewise and microcosmic approach assumes that uncertainty can too easily be transformed into manageable risk. The nature of reality is that it all happens at once: no one can anticipate all the ways that things go wrong, and it is impossible to trace these failures through the overdetermined causal web of a complex system. We are good predictors of the future in some fields. But as Silver demonstrates, our forecasting skills work best in the highly structured domains of games, the transparency of the atmosphere, and the panoptic world of cyberspace. Even the most careful statistical thinking and fastest supercomputers cannot reliably predict the futures of national economies, the global climate system, or turbulent financial markets. Silver’s arguments ultimately echo Taleb’s earlier work, and the lesson is the same: because it hinges on imperfect theoretical assumptions and because of its sensitivity to measurements, complex modeling cannot, at bottom, accurately estimate the frequency or intensity of extreme black swan events.

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So if experts’ predictions are unreliable guides, how are we to manage an increasingly complex world rife with technological, ecological, and economic uncertainty? In his latest book, Antifragile, Taleb sketches a general theory of how systems respond to randomness. The concept comes from his first career as an options trader, observing the different ways in which financial products respond to increased volatility in price changes. Although people generally think of “robustness” (resistance to volatility) as being the opposite of “fragility” (vulnerability to outside disturbance), Taleb argues that this reigning intellectual binary is false. Here he swoops in to invent the missing third term on the spectrum: antifragility. A wine glass is fragile in that its stability requires protection from outside forces; exposure to anything more volatile than a sip or swirl is liable to harm it. The human immune system, in contrast, is antifragile, meaning it requires volatility to remain healthy. The immune system of a child who’s exposed to small disruptions in the form of vaccines, dirt, and a naturally germ-filled environment will grow stronger in response, while that of a child who grows up in a completely sterile environment will be relatively feeble. Robustness lies in the middle of the fragility spectrum: volatility neither helps nor harms a robust object, which remains unperturbed, like an aircraft carrier moving smoothly through a rough sea.

As a trader used to thinking about risk in terms of an investment portfolio, Taleb cares more about exposure to an event than the event’s outcome per se. Although conventional thinking about risk frequently conflates these ideas, they are properly distinct, especially since the relationship between the outcome of a random process and the harm (or benefit) that results is almost always nonlinear. Consider flooding: in advance of its landfall, the National Hurricane Center predicted that Hurricane Sandy would cause the water in New York Harbor to rise 11.7 feet above normal high tide. Errors in this prediction are linear; each additional 5 percent error in the forecast corresponded to an additional seven inches of water on the streets of Red Hook, Far Rockaway, and Lower Manhattan. However, the City’s infrastructure has a nonlinear exposure to the water. For the first six feet of flooding, the subway system remained dry; but a few more inches of flooding allowed the waters to reach the lowest-lying ventilation shafts and station openings, inundating the tunnels and snarling the transportation system for weeks. For a fragile system, like the subway, volatility generally inflicts more pain than gain. This fragility is magnified if a model improperly assumes that mild randomness reigns when the underlying phenomenon is, in fact, wildly random and prone to black swans.

For a fragile system, accurate prediction is key, since even small errors can inflict large costs, as black swans tend to be harmful. There are ways of making a fragile system more robust, such as buying insurance or building levees, but these costs will always be balanced against predicted harm. So fragile systems will only get as much protection as risk analysis justifies. Over-optimization, poor predictions, and exaggerated cost estimates can all lead to situations where fragile systems are left insufficiently protected against future uncertainty. For an antifragile system, in contrast, the asymmetry is reversed: black swans tend to be positive, so increased volatility helps in the long run. In these cases, accurate predictions are less important to long-term success; one only needs to take advantage of positive black swans when they come along. Taleb calls this feature “optionality,” a conceptual generalization of the financial products he used to trade. In finance, an option is a contract with a small, known upfront price that may or may not pay off in the future, depending on the outcome of some specified event. Taleb generalizes this idea to describe any bet that usually yields a small loss but occasionally pays off in a big way.

The startup economy is an example of an antifragile system rooted in optionality. Venture capitalists power the tech scene by making investments in nascent firms. These upfront costs are relatively small and capped. VC firms cannot lose more than they put in. But since there is no upper limit to success, the investment’s upside is potentially unbounded. Of course, venture capitalists need to make smart bets, but the business model doesn’t require them to be so good at predicting winners as to pick one every time. The payoffs from their few wildly successful investments more than make up for the capital lost to failures. While each startup is individually fragile, the startup economy as a whole is highly antifragile, and predictive accuracy is less important. Since the losses are finite and the gains are practically limitless, the antifragile startup economy benefits overall from greater variability in the success of new firms.

Complex systems, such as economies or ecosystems, have so many constituent parts with nonlinear interdependencies that the very notion of discrete links between causes and effects ceases to be reliable. Because these complex interactions are impossible to fully enumerate beforehand, it is dangerous to try reducing one’s uncertainty by “hedging” the risk of one action by taking on another speculative bet, which a risk calculation says is in the “other” direction. As the mathematicians directing LTCM learned painfully, hedging merely balances a risk equation; it offers no true protection against the future’s uncertainty. Instead, Taleb advocates an unsophisticated heuristic approach less reliant on correct predictions: instead of adopting untested technical fixes to counteract problems, stop creating problems in the first place. For example, many proposals to deal with the climate crisis rely on speculative geo-engineering schemes to sequester atmospheric carbon, offsetting others’ emissions. “Carbon credits” could then be sold on exchanges, allowing market forces to determine who gets to keep polluting. But many of these schemes—such as pumping CO2 into supposedly impermeable bedrock formations or “seeding” the oceans with metals to promote phytoplankton growth—have not been shown to permanently remove carbon from the atmosphere, and the side effects of widely deploying them are unknown and potentially serious. Instead of “hedging” so we can continue to pollute, we ought to focus on drastically cutting global greenhouse gas emissions and preventing further deforestation. Rather than trying to solve the crisis in one grand, speculative fix, we ought to stop making the problem worse.

Taleb’s heuristic approach sounds like common sense, and it largely is. But by the time people are fluent enough in risk management to make decisions, their common sense has usually been overwhelmed by an ideological commitment to sophisticated analysis and solutions. Only in this milieu would it make sense to evaluate elements of systems individually, transforming lists of conceivable effects into statistical risk assessments, and deny that irreducible uncertainty lurks in complexity. But thinking in terms of fragility can help elucidate the tradeoffs between the health of parts and wholes.

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As the financial crises of the past three decades have painfully demonstrated, the global banking system is dangerously fragile. Financial institutions are so highly leveraged and so opaquely intertwined that the contagion from a wrong prediction (e.g. that housing prices will continue to rise) can quickly foment systemic crisis as debt payments balloon and asset values shrivel. When the credit markets lock up and vaunted banks are suddenly insolvent, the authorities’ solution has been to shore up underwater balance sheets with cheap government loans. While allowing a few Too Big To Fail banks to use their “toxic assets” as collateral for taxpayer-guaranteed loans makes their individual fiscal positions more robust, all this new debt leaves the market as a whole more fragile, since the financial system is more heavily leveraged and fire-sale mergers consolidate capital and risk into even fewer institutions. These “solutions” to past crises transferred fragility from the individual banks to the overall financial system, creating the conditions for future collapse.

Too Big To Fail is an implicit taxpayer guarantee for banks that privatizes profits and socializes losses. Markets have internalized this guarantee. The judgment that Too Big To Fail banks are, perversely, less risky is reflected in the lower interest rates that creditors demand on loans and deposits. Recent studies estimate that this government protection translates into an $83 billion annual subsidy to the ten largest American banks. This moral hazard rewards irresponsible risk taking, which management will rationalize ex post facto by claiming that no model could have predicted whatever crash just happened. Being Too Big To Fail means that predictors have no “skin in the game.” In making large bets, they get to keep the upside when their models work, but taxpayer bailouts protect them from market discipline when losses balloon and their possible failure put the overall economy at risk. To promote an antifragile economic system, bankers must be liable for the complex products they produce, each financial institution must be small enough to safely fail, and the amount of debt-financed leverage in the system overall must be reduced. These are the most urgent stakes obscured by the difficult mathematics of financial risk. Markets will never spontaneously adopt these reforms; only political pressure can force them.

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The Merce Cunningham Archives

2013-05-20T16:08:45Z

by Lizzie Feidelson

Image: Merce Cunningham Dance Company performing at la Comédie de Clermont in November 2010. (Sandrine Chapuis, This article appears in Issue 16: Double Bind, available now. Subscribe.

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Can Venture Capital Deliver on the Promise of the Public University?

2013-05-17T16:06:30Z

by Bob Meister

An open letter to Daphne Koller, co-founder and co-president of Coursera and professor of computer science at Stanford.

Dear Professor Koller:

Because I share your vision of creating a world in which all have access to an excellent and empowering education, I would like to propose a new online course for you to make freely available through the Coursera platform. Its title is “The Implications of Coursera’s For-Profit Business Model for Global Public Education.”

The goal of the course will be for enrolled students to understand the real relation between Coursera’s visionary mission—“to offer courses, in partnership with the world’s top universities, to everyone for free”—and the logic of the strategic business plan that led Coursera to be named “The Best Startup of 2012” by TechCrunch last January.

Your company’s compelling pitch to consumers suggests that the private sector—that is, venture capitalists and not taxpayers—can deliver a more equal world, in which income will be based on skills and knowledge people actually acquire rather than credentials for which they are eligible and can afford to pay. It is natural to hope that in this more equal and also more productive world, incomes could rise for everyone willing to acquire the necessary academic knowledge and take tests to prove it. This, in fact, was exactly what was promised by the original California Master Plan for Higher Education, paid for by taxpayers, when it was adopted in 1960.

My proposed Coursera course will ask students to discover for themselves how and why John Doerr and other venture capitalists are willing to provide an even greater abundance of knowledge in the service of greater economic and social equality than the State of California, which clearly has the means to spend much more than it has cost your company to reach a worldwide enrollment in the millions.

As the course progresses, my more diligent students will come to see that reducing income gaps through education is not the main problem that Coursera and other Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) providers are trying to solve in their pitch to investors. That problem is, rather, how and when to price the content that you are giving away in your current (pre-public offering) phase of development.

Using Coursera's model of dividing lessons into twelve-minute “chunks,” I will help students see for themselves why its courses can't presently be priced for much more than the $50 a few students are willing to pay for "certificates of completion." The reason is that free MOOCs weaken the link between scarcity and quality on which the business model of all higher education, both public and private, unfortunately depends. By doing this MOOCs open a potential market for mass higher education that is much larger than that of public universities and also threatens those universities’ ability to charge as much as they do for keeping high-quality credentials relatively scarce. What price points in higher education can you take as the baseline for monetizing your product when, as you often say, online courses can scale up from hundreds of students to millions at “near-zero marginal cost”?

The next lesson module would show my students how Coursera and its competitors might try to solve the pricing problem on their own through years of costly experimentation in building their own "brands." Your interactive platform is ideal for allowing students to test the possibility of making access to particular MOOCs artificially selective in order to see how much people are willing to pay for this or that made-up credential. Students would quickly come to see that without legitimation by state government, the existing price points you could use for calibrating your educational products would be those of the for-profit higher education industry, which already has trouble establishing that its offerings are worth what students pay. You could probably pay some of them to say that your courses are equivalent to theirs (plus or minus an allowance for the convenience or inconvenience of having to show up). But financially speaking, this would amount to licensing your courseware to them or buying their existing customer base at a discount.

My students would soon see that a quicker and surer solution to the pricing problem is to peg yourselves to public colleges and universities, such as those of the UC, CSU, and California Community College systems. These colleges are no longer free and accessible, as most MOOCs now are, and they provide three elements for a successful business model that the MOOCs currently lack:

An access spread (based on their level of selectivity)

A price spread (based on their tuition)

A brand spread (based on their overall reputation and that of particular programs)

An expected value spread (based on their anticipated effect on future earning)

My pedagogical aim at this point is to help students think about the socioeconomic spreads created by our public educational system as a potential source of private profit. The first step is to break spreads down into rank orderings and the size of gaps between ranks. This type of thinking already allows businesses selling educational services (such as standardized test preparation and student loans) to identify which students have the opportunity to jump, say, two ranks in a given scale, such as brand or expected income, by overcoming only one gap in another scale, such as SAT scores or tuition payments.

Such products, unlike yours, are not directly educational. But they do help students think of education as a matter of arbitraging among the choices available to them—or in marketing terms, “becoming better choosers in an uncertain and unequal world,” which means becoming potential customers for products that provide them with options for greater mobility among jobs, cities, countries, and so forth.

The best students in my course would instantly grasp the opportunity for MOOCs, such as Coursera, to harvest the economic value of the data generated by US public higher education by adding to the spreads I just described a new, potentially global database of ranks and gaps based on their capacity for near-continuous online testing of student performance. These performance records could be compared with those of students in a public university system without Coursera students needing to be in that system.

Eventually, all students in my Coursera class will learn that the data they now provide to the company for free—perhaps so it can grade them—is the private property of Coursera, which can sell it back to them in the form of “services.” These could include their own performance records and also different “views” comparing them with the records of students at better universities, with higher test scores, and with advanced degrees. The possibilities for renting this information back to students are endless, not to mention the added possibility of developing other markets for the user-assessment information that Coursera will "own."

My students will thus come to understand that the for-profit logic of their online educational empowerment depends on the fact that while they are consuming information, they are also producing information that Coursera can correlate with other data to predict what prices students with particular profiles will eventually be willing to pay. Coursera's big idea, as you have described it, is that assessment every twelve to fifteen minutes helps students learn. This model of user-interaction is similar to that of LinkedIn when it was free, that is, before it went public. Today, LinkedIn users can still perform searches on other people for free, but they must pay for access to information about who has searched for them. From such comparisons my students will learn that there's a lot of money to be made if you can first "grow" your database by giving content away and then "rent" it back to a customers, including those who provided the data, in return for seemingly free use of the platform that collects it.

How, my students will ask, could such a scheme possibly fail? They will learn that the foremost obstacle to immense profitability for Coursera’s investors is establishing the equivalence of the certificates of course completion to academic credit that has an already-established price-for-quality. Coursera’s investors will also need someone, such as the taxpayer, to continue to maintain an educational system of high enough quality and high enough price for there to be a global market for Coursera’s claim to provide a near-equivalent for less.

Here they will get a lesson in politics because, fortunately for Coursera, there are now five bills pending in Sacramento that would require (in various ways) that UC, CSU and state community colleges give "full academic credit" for online courses that are “equivalent” to their own. By performing this service for MOOCs, state government would rationalize its decision to maintain the ranking (brand) of its public universities and colleges while restricting access and raising tuition. This means that such legislation is likely to pass in some form.

But Coursera’s long-term financial future is subject to political risk because the legislative climate can change. Right now it is in your favor because of the publicity generated in this early (too-good-to-be-true) phase of your development. Later, it may be less favorable, as educational outcomes based on measures of success that do not take MOOCs themselves as the standard are studied. If some students think we should go slow on MOOCs until we better understand their optimal use in university instruction, I’ll have the opportunity to teach them some important lessons about the role of money in politics. They will learn that the governor is certainly involved in rushing through MOOC legislation as (almost certainly) are the kinds of venture capitalists who are backing Coursera.

Here I’ll take advantage of the opportunities Coursera’s platform provides to link students to the venture capital higher education blogs. From these they will learn that if any major public university system, such as California's, is required by law to grant equivalent academic credit for a MOOC, the problem of how to monetize enrollment and credit will have been solved. So, ultimately, the success of Coursera depends on your ability to create a climate of opinion that will allow the money in politics to do its work behind closed doors.

Students attuned to the possibilities that this political solution offers should be forgiven if their minds begin to race at this point in the course. There could be virtual UC degrees packaged by bundlers who charge "tuition" for certifying that virtual "students" have qualified by the numbers for UC admission and completed coursework equivalent to that for which UC will be required to offer credit. And then there will be unbundlers who charge "tuition" for comparing students’ performance in a MOOC with that of UC students taking the equivalent course for a degree. At this point the job of a public university will be to maintain its ranking and raise its price so that the MOOCs and their bundlers can profitably market the university’s "brand" to the wider world.

And what a world my Coursera course on Coursera will open up to your students! Your presentations here and elsewhere celebrate the hundreds of millions of potential students in India and Africa who have no access to a UC and Stanford-"quality" education, and can now get it for free through Coursera. This is indeed quite wonderful. With the addition of my course, they will also be able to see that this “free” knowledge is not for the sake of more equality but rather the entering wedge for enormous corporate profits, which are likely to increase inequality still further and to reduce the eventual economic value of the career options those students are seeking online.

Students in my course will also realize that once all the students in the world can get an "equivalent" education, Coursera will be able to set a price for it. And that price will likely turn out to be much more than the world’s students currently pay to attend the for-profit training institutions that line the streets of the emerging markets. Coursera’s potential success in capturing “millions of students rather than hundreds” through its currently “free” course offerings will very likely remove from availability for expenditure in domestic economies a significant share of the trillions of dollars the people of the earth are willing to spend on education. (Isn’t that what you mean when you say that India will no longer need to build new universities to meet the high demand from applicants who can now get US-quality instruction online?)

If my course is as successful as I hope, you may soon be approached by satisfied students who ask you the following questions: Will you and Coursera's co-founder, Andrew Ng, be able to resist the pressure from your investors to charge more than zero for educational products that can be dynamically priced in changing markets? Will you reinvest the hundreds of billions you have shown you can make to achieve more global educational and social equality? Will you eventually teach students the difference between the ability to arbitrage successfully among immediate choices and the many other forms of sustained thought that may be harder to measure than twelve-minute chunks of attention? Could you envision a “capstone” course that helps students become more reflective about the limited conception of education-as-arbitrage at which Coursera excels?

A few students in my course may then ask themselves another question that their successful analysis of Coursera’s business logic suggests: should the public be willing to pay Coursera’s for-profit, market price for academic content, just as it does for the cable TV services that have replaced the public airwaves? Isn’t this another version of the question of whether the internet itself is really “public” when it ceases to be free?

A large part of Coursera's appeal lies in your own nearly socialist vision of an informational Common to which access should no longer be restricted based on the scarcity of places at existing colleges. I personally wish that this part of your vision were coming from the leaders of UC. Instead, they are trying to sell students on paying higher tuition because of the demonstrated role of elite universities in generating income inequality, while also persuading the state legislature to increase "access" (enrollments) so we can generate even more revenue from that tuition.

Here I agree with Coursera’s implicit criticism of public higher education. Public education has all but lost sight of its egalitarian mission while raising its prices at three times the rate of inflation.

I disagree, however, with Coursera’s suggestion that privately financed MOOCs can fulfill the promise once made, and now abandoned, by the public system. The free educational “Common” that Coursera’s business model promises is already built to be enclosed as private property. The question for those of us who teach in public higher education is not whether we can or should resist the creation of a truly “free” informational Common but whether we can keep education as a necessary knowledge commons public in innovative, egalitarian ways that run counter to what you and your rivals are planning and doing.

I do not mean subjecting that commons to direct control by a state government that has already been captured by those who want to give away to private companies the remaining value of the public system.

What I do advocate is government investment in and protection of a system of providing common knowledge for the greater good of all, in the way that public university systems once hoped to do. It’s possible this could be done through platforms such as yours, but only if the information that you are gathering and appropriating for private ownership were socialized on a global scale.

A true educational Commons would be a force for reducing academic hierarchy and income inequality. I'm all for that. You say you are too. But is that what you are telling your partners in finance and university administration? Or are you telling them that they can accumulate even more of what they already have—money and prestige—while appearing to give it away? I will know my course has been successful when my students understand that Coursera’s business model, while offering free higher education (along with the promise of greater social equality) globally, is an exciting venture capital investment opportunity that will ultimately increase privately held wealth and lock in existing educational hierarchies.

Bob Meister

P.S. Would you be willing to co-teach this course with me? I’m sure that together we could reach a very large audience indeed.

Bob Meister is professor of political and social thought in the Department of the History of Consciousness, UC Santa Cruz and president of the Council of UC Faculty Associations.

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El Paso

2013-05-15T15:49:06Z

by Debbie Nathan

The big, desert city of El Paso, on the US border with Mexico, for years felt like a lesson from the work of Giorgio Agamben. In his book Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Agamben analyzes a law from the Roman Empire specifying that if a man committed certain crimes, all of his citizenship rights would be revoked. This punishment, oddly enough, rendered the criminal a homo sacer, a sacred man, whom it was forbidden to ritually sacrifice to the gods. Yet in the everyday world the sacred man could be killed by anyone, with no penalty at all invoked on the killer. He inspired the highest veneration and the basest contempt. He constituted yet another category from Agamben’s work: bare life, or human existence stripped of its social nature and reduced to the purely biological. Bare life defines brutes. Homo sacer, brutes fetishized.

Fetish and brutish were everywhere when I lived in El Paso a generation ago. I’d moved there after wanting to for years, following a cross-country Greyhound bus trip my parents had let me take in the pre–civil rights era, when I was a young teenager living in Houston. I’d seen a few Mexicans in my hometown, downcast speakers of broken English surrounded by a sea of whites who used casual epithets like messkins and beaners. When the Greyhound stopped early in the morning in El Paso, not only did I see grand, gray-silver mountains in the middle of town; I saw Mexicans, everywhere, and all I heard was Spanish, rolling, trilling and glorious. After that I dreamed, literally, of El Paso.

When I moved there as a young adult, in the 1970s, I learned that the culture of my newly adopted city was defined by the fact that many of its people lacked immigration papers. Wetbacks, the English-language morning newspaper called them. Articles about campaigns to apprehend them were headlined Wetback Roundups. At the Border Patrol museum, a homemade place run by retired agents’ wives, one exhibit featured a blown-up photo of an officer yanking a frozen-faced, grade school-aged kid from under the hood of a car. “The Littlest Catch,” was the smiling caption on the bottom of the photo.

Meanwhile, local citizens—such as the author Raymond Carver, who wrote “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” based on a year he spent living and teaching writing in El Paso—would gaily traverse the border to sister Mexican city Juarez, just across the Rio Grande. Carver enjoyed the dog races in Juarez, as well as the bullfights and bargain beefsteaks. Returning home on the high, arching international bridge, he could look down and see Mexican homo sacers crouched on the cement embankment of the river, nervously awaiting the Border Patrol’s shift change so they could splash through the shallow water and disappear into the very first neighborhood in America, a hodgepodge of brick tenements laid out with tiny living rooms and bedrooms, but not with bathrooms.

While the river crossers nursed their nerves, other homo sacers with little wagons and tinkling bells lurked beneath the bridge, hawking distractions to fellow wetbacks—peanuts, sodas and popsicles.

Most crossers made it over safely, but some didn’t. Weekly, the El Paso papers ran boilerplate about nameless Mexicans who got caught in the river or its canals; their bodies sank in the current for days, then were spewed up as corpses ballooned with the animal gas of decomposition. Other homo sacers tried to hop Southern Pacific freights lumbering through downtown; they sprinted while the trains crawled, attempting to coordinate the two speeds and sometimes not succeeding. When the timing was wrong the jumper was thrown under the train and had a foot crushed off, usually at the ankle. El Paso hospitals possessed medicine that could have saved the whole limb, but staff often juiced the patients on morphine and convinced them, while they were joyful and groggy, that they’d be happier back in Mexico with their families. After release papers were signed, the injured homo sacers were shipped to Juarez, where public hospitals were incapable of reattaching body parts and lacked antibiotics sufficient to stop infection below the knee. The south side of the border was populous with men amputated to the thigh. They leaned stolid on the international bridge on handmade crutches, shaking cups.

Back in El Paso, where thousands of legal people lived in comfort if not opulence, Mexicans who’d made it across knocked on doors. Residents answered and inspected little baskets. They contained one contraband cantaloupe sneaked in from Juarez, one lime, and one avocado—samples, and if the customer liked them, he or she placed an order. The Mexicans filled it by trotting back to their cars or trucks, stocking a bag, then returning to the door and politely waiting for a few nickels or dimes. In addition to its dazzling convenience, homo sacer produce was far cheaper than what sold in El Paso’s supermarkets.

The personalized, home delivery of fruit was a border marvel, and so were other rituals, as when tired women knocked, not with fruit baskets but begging for a little work—usually, cleaning windows by rubbing and rubbing and rubbing, not with pricey Windex but with discarded newspaper pages, rendering the windows unbelievably sparkly, for a cost of fifty cents.

For the citizens, El Paso was clean and suburban and boring, while over in Juarez, things were grimy and noisy and wonderful. The streets teemed. There were Indians in rainbow skirts, and Mennonite wives in bonnets speaking a curious German, selling homemade cheese produced on their nearby farms. Finches in wooden cages told your fortune for a peso. Native men beckoned in broken English to tourist men, something about women and shows and donkeys. Years before Starbucks was anywhere, you could get a cappuccino in downtown Juarez at a little café with a huge, Italian machine, and you could sip it while reading the fat daily papers shipped up from Mexico City. The papers cost fifteen cents. The coffee, maybe a quarter.

These lovely rituals derived from two things. One: In Mexico, the economic gap between the poor and the rich was wider, deeper, and therefore uglier than in any other country in the world. Two: the political line separating America and Mexico, the Border-Patrolled border, with its armed agents and green vans and sensors, attracted an endless supply of people who crossed to America anyhow, without anyone much caring, as long as they sold their fruit cheap and cleaned houses almost for free. Life under such circumstances was fraught with risk—and when luck ran out, sometimes it was as though life had hardly transpired. A brief item in an El Paso newspaper from the period provided an example. It briefly recalled a 14-year-old Mexican boy, presumably undocumented, who had hung around outside a barbecue stand on Doniphan Road doing odd jobs for change until, one day, somebody noticed he was gone. Years later, a new owner demolished the barbecue stand to build another business. When the chimney came down, a dried and flattened thing dropped out. It was the boy. He’d been smoked, via recipes involving mesquite and spices and pecan wood, into jerky. No doubt this explained his disappearance, and upon publication of the news article, he was remembered for a day—as a probable illegal-alien delinquent who’d gotten stuck in the chimney while breaking in to rob the till.

And there was the poverty in Juarez. On the boulevards were ragamuffins and their scraggly parents, lunging to wipe your windshield. Or, more often, only to beg for your coins. Off the boulevards, endless tarpaper shacks held endless, endless people. The Spanish-language papers covered the mayhem in these districts. Toddlers fatally run over by cars and buses in areas unequipped with traffic lights or stop signs. Babies dead of dehydration in summer, caused by diarrhea caused by germs caused by no running water. Entire families suffocated on winter nights when their tinny heaters broke, releasing carbon monoxide.

Or maybe not whole families but only the little kids, and maybe not carbon monoxide but sudden flames, which took down everything and everyone before they burned themselves out. Fatal house fires in the slums could not be anything but common, when fathers and mothers left the tarpaper shacks with their children inside, and locked the plank doors behind them by knotting a rope on a hook. They were employed during the day shift, the evening shift, the graveyard shift, and combinations thereof, in the maquiladoras—the hundreds of factories set up in Juarez to take this and that from the United States, assemble it into more complex thises-and-thats, then reimport them over the curving bridge, supplying necessary gizmos to the citizens of America, including but not limited to: the wiring under your car dashboard, everything in your TV and your computer, certain tiny parts of your phone, your doctor’s medical gloves. In Juarez, the parents who locked up their preschoolers earned about $8. Not per hour but per day. It goes without saying they could not afford babysitters. This obvious fact inspired little practical concern among the citizens of El Paso.

They had their own problems, because El Paso itself was exceedingly indigent. In 1990, when the city was still considered a manufacturing hub for work clothes and refined metals, it was the third poorest city in the United States, with over twice the percentage of people living in poverty as the national average. El Paso’s poor were disproportionately Mexican Americans. About a quarter of that group fell below the poverty line, whereas only a twelfth of whites did (the whites, as a matter of fact, were far better off in El Paso than whites in the state of Texas generally; they were also doing better than whites in the whole of America). Median family income in El Paso—again this applied disproportionately to Mexican Americans—was far less than the nationwide average. High school graduation rates were notoriously low.

These statistics were said to derive from a longstanding economic development policy overseen by the local ruling elite. Its members were virtually all white men: bankers, lawyers, land developers, and manufacturers of commodities like sand, gravel, and work pants. Overseeing public education policy, these men ensured that Mexican American and white children went to separate schools, schools in which the latter were tracked into academic courses while the former were taught car mechanics, air conditioner repair, and barbering. These men appointed others like them to the directorships of local law firms, banks, utility companies, and municipal boards, and they ran these institutions with the ease of powerful people who’d been on the border forever. Instead of dress shirts many did business in the summer in guayaberas—traditional, short-sleeved Mexican garb for the well-attired man—and when one mayor saw neckties on men at city hall he cut them off with scissors.

These men were barely interested in philanthropy, donating only piddling amounts during the Christmas season to safe, mainstream charities like Toys for Tots. I went to a benefit at one these men’s houses, in a beautiful neighborhood on a mountain in the middle of the city. This man’s wife had hired a mariachi band for entertainment, and when she noticed one musician staring at the art on her walls and jotting in a notebook, she accused him of “casing” her collection in order to arrange a “heist.” It turned out that when he wasn’t playing mariachi violin and wearing silver-studded pants, the musician studied art at the local university. But he was a Mexican American in El Paso, and the rich saw people like him as peons. The man who lived on the mountain had spent years trumpeting the city thusly during campaigns to lure out-of-town investment to the border.

In so many ways, El Paso did feel full of peons, both brown and white. Early in the afternoon you could get the New York Times at a certain downtown newsstand, except for when you couldn’t. The paper arrived via airplane, but occasionally it contained news —say, about Roe v. Wade surviving another legal onslaught—that offended the local distributor. When that happened, he refused to deliver the merchandise. Days would pass before you could get another New York Times.

Those Times-less days hardly bothered me. In a half hour I could walk from my home to Juarez for the Mexican newspapers. I didn’t go over the border directly. On the way I always stopped at El Paso’s placita, the town square and terminus for the city’s bus system (SCAT, it was called: Sun City Area Transit. Derisively nicknamed Shuttling Chicanos Around Town).

Because of its proximity to Juarez, thousands of Mexicans shopped near the placita every day, including Sunday. Little stores blanketed its periphery. They sold things monied people have no interest in: tube socks from China, bras from China, fake Nikes from who knows where, push-up-butt panties from China, and second-hand clothing for 50 cents a pound (including, if you plowed deep through the piles, Diane Von Furstenberg, Adrienne Vittadini and other gently used designer items from the Goodwills of New York, making a final stop before continuing in bales to the Third World).

Sitting on a bench in the placita, I’d watch the housemaids and students greet one another and buy boiled, chili-sprinkled corn in Styrofoam cups as they waited for their buses. Hawk-eyed vendors with confidential voices hovered, offering untaxed cigarettes ($5 per carton for Marlboros, Salems, Kools), while clean-cut, well-fed guys wearing suspiciously crappy clothes, no doubt agents of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, tried to purchase the product and bust the sellers. Hard-calved Border Patrol agents in spandex shorts parked their bicycles and wandered disconsolately on foot, attempting with spotty success to distinguish the legals from the illegals before stopping people and demanding their papers. The placita was home, too, to wizened guys in big Stetsons. To the homeless: schizophrenics, some of them handsome, gentle panhandlers; others handsome and overly aggressive; some ugly in all respects. To male-on-male hustlers, described so gorgeously in the opening pages of City of Night. (Author John Rechy grew up in El Paso and experienced his first gay trysts there.)

So many things seemed sacred. My daughter was entering adolescence. She was starting to cross the border with her friends, and not just to get drunk in the teen-friendly jello-shot bars just over the bridge. On her own, she was visiting El Paso’s placita, then continuing to Juarez’s municipal market, speaking Spanish with the merchants, bargaining for clothes, exploring herbal folk medicine and folk-Catholic candles. I’d gone to the market, too, one time when I was pregnant. A fat old transvestite had wagged his tweezered brows and offered to read my palm—for free, he insisted, after I told him I didn’t believe in that sort of thing and didn’t want to pay. “It’s a boy,” he announced, peering at my hand. Then, “Tell me, why are you so cruel to your husband?” He smiled and walked away while I stood there, cut to the quick.

It was a boy.

When the boy got bigger, he played outside with the neighbor kids, with no adults in sight. In El Paso children ganged up on their bikes and pedaled together for miles. Or they stayed near home and chased the ice cream truck, with no worrying about safety by their elders. A little boy on our block once streaked down the street on his skateboard, into the path of an oncoming car. My husband was the first adult on the scene: he did CPR but it was too late. My kids were frightened next day when they saw the daily paper with a front-page photo of their father trying to breathe life into a dead child. The Mexican American neighbor kids had it worse—for days they saw the boy’s ghost on the streets. They talked about it constantly, my kids listened raptly, and eventually the ghost was forgotten and the streets refilled with skateboards. The fruit vendors continued their treks, as did the window polishers, followed by the Border Patrol, who sometimes caught and beat their prey, sometimes locked them up for hours without water or a meal.

Some of us were disturbed by the brutality. We founded an advocacy group for undocumented immigrants. People would call our hotline with stories of mistreatment; we would make press releases and march downtown. The Border Patrol started building a big fence to block off Juarez from America. We waved angry signs and climbed a mountain. The city’s coolest, most righteous people joined our group, or at least gave money. We gained members and got quoted in the national press. We starting holding annual fundraiser dinners, to which everyone came in dress clothes—even some local politicians, those not afraid to stand publicly for human rights.

In the early 1990s dramatic, disturbing things began occurring on both sides of the border. One was the that North American Free Trade Agreement—NAFTA—created an explosion of big-box store openings in Juarez, and thousands of want ads appeared in the Spanish-language papers seeking more labor for the maquiladoras. These factories enjoy a special arrangement with US Customs. When freshly assembled goods are sent north across the bridge, their owners pay import taxes, but not on the entire product, only on the quantum of value added by Mexican workers earning eight American dollars per day. Lured by the assembly bargain as it burgeoned after NAFTA, factories left El Paso and went south. By the turn of the 21st century, El Paso had evolved from a manufacturing town to a service economy in which unemployment went down—even as poverty went up.

Meanwhile, on the other side was murder. In 1993, the same year that NAFTA was passed, poor women in Juarez began to be brutally killed in unprecedented numbers, mostly by husbands and boyfriends gone berserk. Who knows why they started acting so violent? The maquiladoras preferred women workers, ostensibly because they were more docile than men and less apt to unionize. Some analysts noted that NAFTA was accelerating the movement of Mexican females from the home to factories and the streets, perhaps threatening traditional machismo and inciting rage in males.

Amid the domestic mayhem, scores of women were also offed by strangers in the most horrid, sadistic ways, involving rape both anal and vaginal, breasts cut off, the bodies buried in dumps. By the end of the decade some 400 women had been murdered, about a fourth of them victims of sadistic, ritualistic sex killings. When women’s activists got interested in these murders, it became abundantly clear that the Juarez authorities could not or would not solve them. It was soon also obvious that men, too, were being slaughtered, and that the homicide of both sexes was probably a byproduct of narco-trafficking, which NAFTA had exacerbated by making it easier to ship both legal and illegal goods across the border.

By the turn of the 21st century in El Paso, people were getting so uneasy about Juarez that many stopped going.

In 2006, the newly elected President of Mexico declared a national war on drugs and sent troops to the areas considered most beleaguered by the cartels. Under fire, the various mafias jockeyed to redefine their turf. Spectacular internecine violence broke out in Juarez, and by 2010 over 3,000 residents a year were being slaughtered. The victims were men, women, children—people involved in the drug trade and many with no connection at all, innocent bystanders and those targeted by mistake. A quarter of a million people left Juarez—about a sixth of the population—abandoning thousands of homes and businesses. Large swathes of the city were painted with graffiti, torched, or left to the elements, crumbling to the ground. Areas of Juarez started to resemble the racial ghettos of the United States after the 1960s riots.

+ + +

El Paso, too, was changing. The sacred rituals of bare life were starting to disappear, even as bare life became wider spread.

First to go were the vendors. They evaporated after 1993, when a new Border Patrol chief decided that, rather than chasing wetbacks through neighborhoods and the placita, it would be more efficient to line the Rio Grande with green-uniformed agents every few hundred feet and prevent people from crossing in the first place. Door-to-door avocado peddling came to an end, along with the bare-bones income the saleswomen had carried from El Paso back to their families in Juarez. I visited my fruit vendor after the policy change, at her hut in a Juarez slum. The border blockade was only a few months old but during that time she’d lost ten pounds, and her five daughters and one son also looked thinner. She asked about my kids and the other boys and girls in my neighborhood. But by then more children were staying inside.

On the adult-citizen front, a human rights-oriented politician got hold of city government. He was Raymond Caballero, a Chicano lawyer who never would have assumed that a mariachi musician looking at art was thinking of pulling a heist. Caballero won a mayoral election and promptly started criticizing the corruption of the rich, white business establishment—including one of its more powerful members, who’d recently been imprisoned on charges of bank fraud but received a presidential pardon from Bill Clinton when he was leaving office. The new mayor vowed to stop begging for investment crumbs from out-of-town, low-wage corporations, and instead to encourage the development of local small business in El Paso. He also recruited young people—including Chicanos and the human rights activists—to join him in the practice of citizenship by running for city council and the county Board of Commissioners. The big businessmen were miffed, and in 2003, they organized to successfully defeat Caballero when he ran for a second term.

But the young, self-styled progressives he’d recruited ran their own campaigns, and soon they were heading the local government. They were a new breed who had gone to great colleges and universities out of town. The sheepskins of El Paso’s elite formerly came from the Texas College of Mines, Southern Methodist University, and Baylor. The upstarts sported diplomas from Princeton, NYU, Stanford, Emory, Columbia. They’d absorbed the rhetoric of immigration and rights—as well as a painful understanding of how the Reagan era had withdrawn federal money from the cities of America, leaving them as desperate and pathetic as the women scrubbing windows with crumpled newspapers, the illegal lime sellers, the freight-train amputees on the international bridge.

Back in their new elected jobs on the border, these young people came to understand what almost every politician in the nation knew: that to get anything done, they would need to placate big business.

The big business community in El Paso was developing its own new breed. Instead of stashing art collections in their houses, they were donating money to museums to purchase paintings for the public to enjoy. They were forming economic-development think tanks that stressed that public corruption discouraged corporate investment; corruption should be rooted from El Paso and punished.

This new elite was militantly Republican when it came to economics, but pacifist in the nation’s culture wars—abortion, birth control, and homosexuality didn’t raise their hackles. And they were staunchly cosmopolitan when it came to trans-border mixing with equals of their class. One transplanted El Pasoan, originally from Houston, had been married to a blonde American and divorced. He remarried, to a blonde daughter of the most affluent family in Juarez. This clan had roots in Spain and a history of higher education in Boston. Its matriarch was renowned for tireless charity on behalf of destitute Juarez women in need of doctors and contraception.

The family had amassed astounding wealth—wealth said to eclipse the fortunes of the richest of the rich in El Paso—by acquiring a virtual monopoly on the production and distribution of beer in Juarez. They also ran a chain of convenience stores there, stocked with their own private police who were ordered, when confronted with beer-run kids and other would-be robbers, to shoot to kill, and often did just that. The patriarch of the family had funded the Juarez university and other good causes. The daughter had invested in a baseball team, and she was sponsoring the construction of a children’s museum in Juarez that would dwarf anything north of Mexico City.

Her El Paso husband, an up-and-coming billionaire, had met her at a professional and social group for binational masters of the universe. After the wedding he, too, became a superphilanthropist, giving El Paso $50 million for the border’s first and only medical school. Wonderful, everyone said—everyone. A few old-school anticapitalists and die-hard Chicanos still mistrusted public–private partnerships. But who could argue with health?

Meanwhile, the young, progressive politicians were studying the work of Richard Florida, inventor of the theory of “the creative class.” According to Florida, struggling American cities could redeem themselves economically by attracting young gays, bohemians, and Silicon Valley types who seek diversity, tolerance, nightlife, and fun on the streets. El Paso’s young pols did not stop with Florida. They also looked at “The New Urbanism,” a challenge to Sunbelt-style sprawl. It emphasized city walkability, curbside intimacy, and, most of all, entertainment and shopping downtown.

Of course, there was already entertainment and shopping in downtown El Paso—the mom-and-pops with their steady customers, the embattled and often comical Border Patrol and ATF agents. But this was not what the pols had in mind. The businesspeople hired a focus group firm to go around asking people: If you could retool the city of El Paso into a person or persons, who would those people be? The answer, according to the firm’s report: Matthew McConaughey and Penelope Cruz. And who, the focus group interviewers also asked, did the current, unrehabbed El Paso seem like? The report visually depicted the response as an anonymous Mexican geezer, a dead ringer for the elderly men in Stetsons over at the placita. The report labeled him “The Old Cowboy,” describing him as “dirty,” “lazy,” “uneducated,” and Spanish speaking.

The Old Cowboy could not have been more downscale and contemptible. The problem, however, was that he looked just like many El Pasoans’ beloved papás y abuelitos. Indignant, many people began organizing against the downtown renewal plan. It eventually died, after courts outlawed use of eminent domain to tear down private buildings in the Old Cowboy’s stomping grounds.

By 2008, thousands of middle-class and rich people in Juarez, desperate to avoid shakedowns, murders, and kidnappings by cartel hit men, had begun packing up and fleeing to El Paso, where they bought houses and opened businesses. Their migration kept the northern side of the border economically afloat and turned Juarez into a pariah city—or worse, a ghost city that El Pasoans ceased thinking about.

Thanks to the well-heeled immigrants and their expatriate enterprises, gourmet restaurants flowered on the US side of the border. El Paso’s new medical school and other, related medical facilities bankrolled by the new elite created administrative jobs with $100,000+ salaries. Their wallets fat from the windfall, heretofore middle-class El Pasoans who’d spent years satisfied with the $7.99 Luby’s Cafeteria Special now paid five times as much to dine on exotic cheeses, confits, and sauces, the names of which they’d never heard a decade earlier, much less known how to pronounce. People wanted booze with their fancy food: throughout the city, the number of business applications for alcohol licenses skyrocketed. Between meals, El Pasoans were now practicing yoga at new yoga studios. Women were having their legs waxed at new salons and patronizing new spas for new treatments: skin polishing, hot stone, mud.

The city was getting ready for Matthew McConaughey and Penelope Cruz.

El Paso’s poverty indicators continued to rise. By 2010 over a third of residents lived in areas of town classified by demographers as suffering from extreme destitution. In those slum areas—many of which lay right near downtown, near the offices of the rich businesspeople—public high schools were illegally kicking students out because they’d failed Texas’ high-stakes No Child Left Behind exam. Children with limited English and poor, immigrant parents were labeled civic liabilities and expunged from civic institutions—further defined, that is, as bare life.

In Juarez, the adolescent cousins of the kicked-out El Paso students had no education at all. Public school in Mexico costs families money, and poor parents could not afford the price of uniforms, textbooks, lunches, and “tips” paid to teachers for teaching. Ninis, the poor teens of Juarez were called in Spanish, short for ni estudian ni trabajan—“neither studying nor working.” Many did work, however, for the cartels. For a few bucks, on assignment with a handgun, ninis would murder disobedient drug dealers or ride the city bus downtown and extort $100 payments from storeowners, keeping for themselves 10 percent. But then a rival organization would ambush and shoot the ninis with an AK-47. Or police would do the job. Cockroaches, the mayor of Juarez called the delinquent ninis.

El Paso was touted by the FBI as the safest large city in America, and while civic leaders celebrated this fact, no one understood why it was so. Some speculated that El Paso was a loving, caring place, and it takes a village to make a law abider. Some credited the city’s huge immigrant population, praising them for being too busy working to cause trouble. Others wondered if the immigrants were simply too scared to do wrong, especially the undocumented ones, since even the lowliest crime could get a person without papers deported.

Down by the river, drownings continued. Over the July 4 holiday in 2011, a Juarez man desperate for work tried to swim to El Paso while holding his 5-year-old daughter, who was wearing a red-and-white dress. They went down together and when they resurfaced days later, his body had so rotted that he couldn’t be identified; she was recognized because of the dress. Besides this father and daughter, two dozen other migrants died that year trying to cross to El Paso.

Meanwhile the public and the private melded further. The gringo billionaire and his Mexican wife got interested in buying a sports team; so did the founder of the think tank. They formed a partnership and asked the city to pay for an arena or a stadium to be located downtown, not far from several historic but decrepit buildings that the billionaire was lovingly rehabbing. The city joined the investors even as it was rerouting its buses away from the placita. With El Paso’s Chicanos shuttled elsewhere around town, downtown had emptied out.

In El Paso in 2012, the rich people and the politicians presented voters with a “quality of life” bond-issue proposal. For a half billion taxpayer dollars, El Pasoans were told, they could improve the city zoo, fix up the history museum, and add cool things to downtown, including a “multi-use entertainment facility,” a.k.a an “arena”—though the rich and the politicians avoided that term because they’d been advised by development experts that “arena” sounds controversial. It tends to remind voters of the many cities nationwide that have spent millions of tax dollars for sports facilities in the name of economic development, only to find later that no development has occurred. For the same reason, people also dislike “stadium,” so in El Paso the prescribed term was “ballpark.” A ballpark was needed now, for $50 million, to house the businesspeople’s minor-league team.

Out in the neighborhoods, many of El Paso’s middle and working classes met this proposal with jaundice. At a meet up for constituents organized by a city council member who was planning to run for mayor, attendees stood and cursed taxpayer-funded stadiums for the rich and their private sports teams. “I used to feel the same as you,” answered the council member. He’d changed his mind, he continued, because of the stunning generosity of the philanthropists, as well as—let’s face it, he warned—the frightening possibility that they would relocate to Dallas or Phoenix if they didn’t get their way.

The original bond proposal, drawn up by city council in the spring, stipulated that voters would decide on the ballpark in the November general election. But suddenly, at a city council meeting in June, it was announced that the businesspeople had made an offer on a Triple-A team from Tucson, and the deal could not go through unless the team’s owners were immediately reassured that El Paso would build them a ballpark.

“Immediately?” everyone asked. Immediately, the businesspeople insisted. And the ballpark simply could not be out on the highway—it had to be built downtown.

To make room, the city manager recommended dynamiting El Paso’s ten-story, 33-year-old city hall and moving its functions to various places around town—including the daily newspaper building, which was up for sale because, like the Fourth Estate everywhere, the El Paso Times wasn’t doing so well. The move would work, the pols said, because the city no longer needed a unitary place for local government as much as it needed a brand new, “quality-of-life” sports venue—a place even the people of Juarez would commute to, they insisted (though Juarez itself was almost finished building a big baseball stadium—but no El Paso pols knew this because none followed the Juarez media).

A vote was quickly taken. The instant it came out “Yes,” city council members responsible for the victory reached under their desks, whipped out baseball caps, and posed with wide grins for a photo op.

Civil war briefly erupted. Some people filed lawsuits to try to halt the demolition. Some organized an “Occupy” and spent a night in front of city hall. None of their efforts mattered. The courts ruled against them. The city manager called them “crazies.”

A few weeks before the demolition, I took a walk to downtown El Paso. The streets in my neighborhood were as still as the surrounding desert: no fruit vendors, no ice cream trucks or little kids—gentrification, with its cloistering of the young, was in full swing. Farther on I passed the placita, empty but for a man in a suit surveying the nearby old buildings that, because of the stadium and other impending downtown development, would soon appreciate in value.

Over at city hall the parking lot was spray-painted with mystic arrows and numbers resembling the hieroglyphs we saw on TV not long ago, in the drowned, post-Katrina neighborhoods of New Orleans. There the markings had been inscribed in an effort to save homes and people. Here they augured an assault on civic life. Inarguably, city hall had always looked pretty awful—like a giant, glass toaster oven, roasting in the sun. It dated from the 1970s and was architecturally cheesy and funky. But in a sacred and moving way, funk in El Paso had once been a shared culture, embracing not just the person with immigration status and money, but even, sometimes, the homo sacer.

I walked on to the river, to a half-hidden break of wild bamboo, weeping willows, and discarded beer and soup cans. Deep in the brush were two plastic garbage bags jerry-rigged as tents, stocked with the minimal gear of bare people not at home—they must have been out on the streets, making a bare kind of living. I wasn’t sure how they could do that anymore. Just after the stadium election, city council had banned the homeless from soliciting in front of ATMs and restaurants, on the medians of wide streets, or on any property whose owner disliked begging. (The language of the new law, city council carefully noted, was devised so as not to violate anyone’s rights under the First Amendment.)

It was also unlawful for garbage-bag dwellings to be pitched by the river, and their presence, just blocks from the upcoming stadium, could not be good for tourism. Some official would surely be along soon with a camera, pen, and clipboard, documenting the encampment for the commonweal, ensuring its eviction.

But what address would that official come from and return to, with one-stop government replaced by private stadium suites? Sabe, I thought—who knows? In the border’s newly bare metroplex it was hard anymore to see the civic, much less the sacred. What remained was corporate minor league. On the other hand, if we were lucky the crazies would be able to afford tickets, at least on discount days. Old Cowboys all, they would replace their Stetsons with ball caps, sit in the nosebleed section, and like everyone else, even El Paso’s billionaire, engage in the sacred ritual of gobbling concession popcorn. Which in Spanish is called palomitas, which also means “little doves.”

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Bangalore Pride

2013-05-13T16:00:00Z

by Raghu Karnad

Image: Bangalore Pride, 2008. Photo via flickr (peevee@ds).

Every queer pride parade in an Indian city is a sort of landmark event. But not every parade reveals a whole new sexual category before it’s over. At Bangalore Pride 2012, which was held last November, I overheard for the first time the term “Androidgyny.” That's “androgyny” fused with “Android”: capital-A, meaning not a generic humanoid robot but the Google smartphone operating system.

The Google OS has a mascot, Bugdroid, which looks like a somewhat evolved relative of R2D2; hemisphere-headed, but with antennae and limbs. Usually it has a green coat. For Bangalore Pride, it busted out the rainbow colors. So is Bugdroid gay? Does it have android hardware but gynoid software? Does it dream of electric she-boys? We didn’t care to know. Every act of love matters, and deserves respect, and that will still be true even after the robots take over.

This basic message of Bangalore Pride has been affirmed over five years of marches, while other messages, more specific to policy, have risen or fallen in amplitude. The demand to revise a 19th-century law, still used to criminalize homosexual acts, had made a major noise in previous years, but this year it was inaudible, as the matter was before the Supreme Court and the queer rights movement in India is nothing if not judicially savvy. (Its verdict is expected in the winter of 2013 before the senior judge hearing the case retires.) Other talk was common to pride marches everywhere:

“I’m just not sure that this kind of display is the most effective way to make the public understand. But next year, if we made everyone wear shirts and ties . . .”

“. . . And they’re like pose, pose, pose— I mean, come on ya, is this an event to support queers or to support photojournalists?”

“That girl. That one. Just, please tell me she’s single. And lez.”

So it came to be that the singular message broadcast by last year’s Pride was the support for gay rights in the corporate new economy. Only in Bangalore! And not just because of the eminence of the software and outsourced services industries here; this is the only major Pride March in India that permits groups to display corporate branding. The largest banners, flexi-printed onto polythene rather than hand-scrawled on droopy cardboard, were supplied by Google, IBM, and Goldman Sachs. Each of the corporations has an in-house network of LGBT workers, and funds its participation in Pride events across India, or even as far afield as San Francisco. Their banners reared up over the rest of the neon procession, like brassy chariots behind the foot soldiers.

I liked that the group from IBM, the Employee Association for Gay & Lesbian Advancement, call themselves E.A.G.L.E., bringing some of that corporate animality to the usually mild lexicon of gay rights. The deputation from Goldman Sachs was called, simply, the LGBT Network, and their banner said, simply, “PRIDE,” in a font commonly seen on boxes of spreadsheet software. Here another principle of corporate ops: act boring while you change everything.

“Hey, are you guys there? I'll be there in a minute, five minutes.”

“We’re at the Goldman banner! Can you hear me? Meet us near the Goldman banner!”

It could have meant a lot of things, at a queer pride march, but it turned out to mean this, and we ended up trailing behind the Goldman banner for six kilometers: plenty of time in which to wonder why it was there. It’s good to learn that the firm supports its queer consultants, as part of its broader undertaking in India to promote queer-inclusive workplaces. But that did feel like the right answer to the wrong question. Watching the investment bank proclaim its integrity on sexual rights was like sitting with an abusive uncle at lunch and having him lecture you about sustainable energy. Surely this is not what you came here to say. If only Goldman could repackage social attitudes the way they repackaged derivatives: the firm might redeem the word “fabulous” from what was done to it by its most famous employee, “Fabulous” Fabrice Tourre.

Apparently not evil, and easily most popular at Pride 2012, were the Gayglers (“gay” + “Googlers,” but you got that). There were a lot of them, and they were passing around bright, branded yo-yos and stickers to all the sad sorts who had turned up at a Pride march in black T-shirts. Soon the parade was swarming with rainbow Bugdroids. They got everywhere: onto our lapels and butt-pockets and noses and windshields.

I remembered what it had meant, in college, to be called a Bug: Bisexual Until Graduation. In it for the ride, not for real. I hoped Bugdroid was in it for real. Because my own chest now expressed the demand for fairness, respect, love, and a low-cost, Linux-based smartphone platform.

+ + +

The curious position of queer rights in India is this: although it is opposed, it has no clear opponent. The severe social taboo is real enough, but its representatives, when they form up, usually appear as a motley bunch of eccentrics and stodgy clerical officials, shuffling through an unstudied brief against homosexuality. Arrayed against the queer movement on the matter of IPC 377, the Victorian-era criminal provision, are the bureaucracies of the All India Muslim Personal Law Board and the Apostolic Churches Alliance, but most vocal in those ranks are an astrologer named Suresh Kumar Kaushal and a celebrity guru named Baba Ramdev, who appears to believe he can cure AIDS with yoga.

The contrast is stark with the United States, where the equality of gay citizens is a brittle “wedge issue,” held in place by massive religiopolitical machines. They have, at least, the decency to be openly paranoid and obsessive. In India, the movement battles only against a thick gas of taboo, and only the occasional nutter seems to rush out of it into the sunlight.

On the other hand, many proponents of gay rights are youngish, charismatic, full-hearted people, fiercely urban and full of discretion on everything from their politics (left) to the cut of their jeans (tight). This part of the movement comes from privilege, and is in fact comparatively small, especially in Bangalore. The real numbers, and the full-time personnel, come from working-class groups, especially alliances of HIV activists, kothis, and hijras (third-gender minorities who, though they inherit a tradition centuries old and widely tolerated in India, must survive on the most ragged fringes of public performance and sex work). Sangama, one vanguard group, concentrates on people from “poor and/or non-English-speaking backgrounds,” whose lives would otherwise be remote from the cosmos of queer solidarity.

The deepening of India’s democracy drew power away from urban elites, who are now intensely aloof from electoral politics. The reaction to the thought of dealing with state politicians, even among activists, is part allergic inflammation and part dry heave. Sangama, however, operates in Kannada (the main vernacular in the region) and represents “traditional” transgender communities, and it is able to cultivate ties with politicians. It has the support of leaders nominally left-wing as well as right-wing, including even one top adviser to the previous, now disgraced, chief minister B. S. Yeddyurappa. One of Sangama’s founders, Manohar Elavarthi, has started his own party, aiming to become the first “out” gay man in the country to hold elected office.

This inclusion means the queer-rights struggle has a diverse class-base unlike any other in India. In a country with a genius for exclusion, there’s power in the fact that anyone can be born gay. It gives the movement a presence in both “civil society” and “political society,” as in Partha Chatterjee’s formulation of two separate domains of political action: the former the bourgeois public sphere where formally available individual rights are won, the latter comprised of the urban and rural poor seeking group claims, who settle more ad hoc and even unstable arrangements through direct political negotiation. This diversity can also be inferred from policy wins. In Madras in 2008, working-class groups managed to get a third-gender category included on ration cards, securing their right to subsidized rice and kerosene. Simultaneously, in Delhi, graduates of India’s most elite law college made liberal arguments before the High Court, knocking the supports out from under IPC 377.

The latter often have better English than the judges weighing their cause. As artists and the intelligentsia, metropolitan activists put other media to eloquent use as well. And the coup de grâce is their own photogenicity, revealed at events like Pride: they look the part of New India. Apart from their sexualities, but also because of that, they make good early-adopters of lifestyle goods and cultural stuff. Among other, more intentional battles, they’re at the forefront of the battle between Bugdroid and Blackberry.

With this combination of dazzling advocates and murky opponents, the movement presents practically no barriers to corporate participation. These are real contingencies behind the decision of Google and Goldman to publicize their support for queer rights here. Which is for better or for worse. The movement absolutely wants corporate India to be outspoken in its commitment to fairness. In much of the West, tacit corporate acceptance gave the media sanction to support queer visibility and rights. Yet the movement will also want to avoid being stained through “pinkwashing,” or even basic brand placement. If that can be imagined happening to any Indian political movement, this is the one. A guy from Monsanto may be calling next; an answer should be ready.

+ + +

Cast aside doubt—onward the march! “I've never seen any of this before,” I heard someone say. That’s a phrase you might hear at almost any Pride march, but it’s usually spoken by onlookers. Here the voice belonged to a member of the march, as she stood at the crest of an overpass, marveling at the view over its side.

The Pride March had convened at Tulasi Park next to Majestic Bus Station, and then bounced gaily toward its other terminus, the Town Hall stairs. The entire route is located within what is called the “City,” the fuming gut of the Kannada metropolis, a canyon of cement, cheap cladding, and crooked signage. Bangalore’s main railway station and bus terminal are here, as well as the biggest cinemas that screen movies in Kannada. This part of town is the oldest and the youngest: new arrivals from the countryside spread thin blankets on the cement, but buried deep below them is the pete, the native settlement which preceded the British Cantonment and colonial Bangalore. The area embodies the intermediate class of the state: its urban transition, its congested hopes, its flattery by politicians, its loyalty to the most dreadful film industry; its centrality and power and exclusion and neglect all at once.

Its opposite pole is the one that is colonially derived. The Cantonment was raised by an early-modern corporation, the East India Company, and has been reoccupied by late-modern corporations since the ’90s. Then as now, it offered access to serious capital if you knew the password: the English language. To those of us raised in the milieu of the “Cantt,” the City is still barely visible, except as a sort of sandstorm, depositing the grit of the hinterland on our doorsteps. Its sound is a vernacular roaring. The separateness of “City” and “Cantt” was the main expression, in my life, of all that was colonially designed and had to be postcolonially denied. Even in the post-colony, the privileged folk of the Cantt rarely cross into the City, except to catch trains—though the Cantonment has its own train station—and anyway who takes trains anymore?

“I’ve never even been in this part of the city before.”

Yet here we were, wearing white capris and Ferrari-red porkpie hats; wearing feather boas. Wearing our Adidas (instead of our chappals) because walking on those streets can be, seriously, like hiking in the wild. Many of the marchers weren’t Cantt people, of course. Many belonged to the same class as the onlookers, and these City areas. Others, like the hijras in the march, had seen much worse. At Pride 2012, however, they were far below headcount. This year Sangama did not actively participate. Under logistical strain, it was reserving resources for a separate march in the spring; they planned to demand action on government promises of housing and credit assistance for hijras, a livelihood issue that would not get much of an airing at Pride. Their absence left Pride looking unusually privileged. It also thinned the visual field to the advantage of the Goldman banner. So corporate capital had entered the movement, and was already making claims on our attention, if not yet on the activism altogether.

I tried not to fret about it.

At the end of each year’s Pride, the organizers hand over the task of planning to a new, younger team, to fresh blood. Last year’s team, while permitting company branding, insisted that there could be no corporate sponsors for the march itself. A new team might differ. Marches need money. Consider the hypothetical day that marketing departments are admitted into decisions about what, and who, constitutes Bangalore Pride. What should it look like? Not like an under-nourished kothi from Bellandur wearing an itchy polyester shirt. It won’t be hard to conclude that working-class marchers should be allowed to march off in their own direction. Against centuries of conditioning, Bangalore Pride has stormed the walls that separate different classes of queer citizens. It could easily fall back, turn away from the wall, to tarry instead on the trimmed lawns of the Cantt.

I really tried not to fret about it. But our giddy procession had begun to look less like a path to justice and more like another field for capital to seize and use it to do justice only to itself. The thought would drop away, but bounce back to mind, like a Gaygler’s yo-yo.

The march progressed. And despite all our elite trepidation, the City received us with color and warm ambience. Crowds of thin, slipper-wearing men watched without hostility; some had diffident questions. The area is mostly exhaust-gray, but rainbow colors seemed to crackle out of its corners in reaction; the red-and-yellow stripes of Kannada nationalism seemed to perk up for the parade. So did the juice-stain posters for Yograj Bhatt’s new flick Drama. The municipal murals on every wall, of airborne dolphins and Chola dancers suffocating under cartoonish breasts, felt like lurid but not inappropriate decor for the occasion. The face of Chief Minister B. S. Yeddyurappa smiled benevolently upon us from posters at every street junction. Perspiring activists ambushed the parked ice cream carts, which served up cassattas nearly as bright as the clothes that they dripped onto.

We relaxed into our stride. Our attention was somewhere new now, shifted from the taut banners of our corporate allies. The City was becoming visible to the marchers, even as the marchers became visible to the City, and surprise and incomprehension were in gay eyes as well. In the mingled hubbub of the road and the parade, it was easy to miss: the moment when both seemed to speak together, and say together, “I live here, too.” One presented its sexuality, the other presented its geography, and neither was found to be as fearful or repellent as may have been expected. It didn’t exactly promise a future in which Kannada pride and gay pride learn they are sisters. Yet it was a moment to flourish in each other’s gaze as humans, not as demons. The aim of the march felt true, with these other humans before us. I could forget for a while about the Androids coming up behind.

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Saliva

2013-05-10T15:33:22Z

by Álvaro Enrigue

The following is from Mexican writer Álvaro Enrigue's first short story collection to appear in English, Hypothermia, out now from Dalkey Archive Press.

Among all the connections he’d made inside the World Bank, a city within a city, Malik was the closest thing he had to a friend. They’d shared a tiny cubicle when he started at the organization, and they’d developed an open, easygoing working relationship: they chatted at break time, strolled out together for a midmorning coffee, and shared part of the commute home to the suburbs on the Metro. Their exchanges always had something of the comic routine in them, which the other employees in the Development Projects office found a little shocking.

The difference between his relationship with Malik and those he had with the rest of his acquaintances at the Bank lay exclusively in what they talked about. Malik had been born in Sri Lanka and raised in Boston. He was intelligent, cultured, progressive, and nobody among the few who knew him understood very well why he worked there. I’ve got four little savages to feed, was the most he offered as an explanation. The extent of his erudition regarding almost everything showed that he was essentially a reader: between the ruckus from his children and his wife’s Hindu relatives, about whose endless visits he never stopped complaining, he must have spent his afternoons and evenings in some armchair in a little white house with a yard and garden, reading up on world culture.

The problem with gringos, Malik said to him one day, is that they don’t know how to make conversation. They share their opinions when they feel authorized to do so, but they don’t know how to sit down and talk about anything just to talk about it, without getting impatient. In Boston I used to live in the Hindu neighborhood, which is really something else, but since I came to the Washington suburbs, I’m like the deaf mute of Sidon.

He recognized the Biblical sound in the name of the deaf mute that Malik was talking about, but he preferred not to ask: on a previous occasion when he’d shown his ignorance about Christian tradition, the Sri Lankan had worn himself out laughing at him. He waited until Malik went to the bathroom to make his ablutions—he was notoriously slow about it—to look up the reference on the internet. He found it in a moment: it came from the Gospel of St. Mark.

Jesus departed the rich, illustrious, and orthodox region of Tyre, where he had been preaching in synagogues to his own class. He entered the poor Gentile region of Decapolis, on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, where the people that had heard tell of him were more interested in his shamanic healing powers than in his reputation as a rabbi. During his first day staying in Decapolis a large crowd brought to him a man who was a deaf mute. Resigned to his fame, Jesus drew apart a little from the spectators; he took the man by the shoulders and violently pushed him down onto his knees. He vigorously thrust a finger in the man’s ear. With his free hand he forced open the deaf mute’s mouth, and in a single motion stretched out the man’s tongue, letting fall on it a drop of his own saliva. He shouted at him Ephphatha!—which means Be opened! and he tugged on the man’s hands for him to rise. The man thanked him with perfect diction then asked what he could do to repay him. Jesus told him to keep his cure a secret. St. Mark doesn’t say whether or not the man lived the rest of his life in the paradox of pretending to be a deaf mute, although he shows that the man’s companions didn’t pay much attention to the Nazarene’s orders.

When Malik returned from the bathroom, he was waiting for him with a joke: Ephphatha! he shouted at him when he saw him walk through the door, and in case his friend didn’t remember the evangelist’s exact text, he translated: Be opened! The Sri Lankan smiled. I’ve tried, he added, but it turns out worse: to be open you need someone who feels like listening, and gringos have enough problems being gringos without trying to listen to others.

A few days after talking with Malik about Jesus curing the man from Sidon, and his paradoxical destiny, the telephone on his desk rang. A secretary informed him that the Bank’s Director of Communications wanted to speak with him, that he should come up to the third floor right away. It was then nine or ten o’clock in the morning and by lunch time he was already cleaning out his desk. He said goodbye to the Sri Lankan, who accompanied him to the elevator carrying a small box, and who did not once stop talking about the relationship between medieval mendicants and the modern day globalophobics who made their lives impossible with their demonstrations and protests.

The Communications Office was much more demanding than the catacombs of Development Projects, so much so that he was forced to alter his habits completely. He had no news about Malik for more than a year, until one day they happened to run into each other at the Middle Eastern food stand in the Bank’s food court. “I haven’t heard anything about you,” he said to his old office companion, a little bit embarrassed because it was obvious who had been the master and who the apprentice, and who should have been the one to call whom. I’m in the same place as always, in the asshole of the building, at the bottom of the ladder. And you? Moving right along: a few months after they called me up to Communications they promoted my boss to be regional director, so now I’m on the fourth floor, in an office with a window. And you must be delighted. Delighted. In this company, the higher up you go the more sinister it gets, so I don’t really envy you. That’s why you’re my hero. I don’t want your admiration, I want money. That’s what I need so I can quit this shitty job. As they walked to the table they caught up on the details of each other’s lives. You’re really skinny, the Sri Lankan told him when they were seated, I’m sure they’ve got you working morning, noon, and night. They do, he answered, but that’s not why. Then it’s from chasing skirts. More or less. Ephphatha!

Since I accepted the job here and they put me into Development Projects with you, he told him, I was aware that a woman with whom I’d had a very intense relationship many years ago was living in DC, married to a Bank employee. That was the only thing I knew, and it was only secondhand gossip because I’d never been in touch with her since we split up. Then one day, added the Sri Lankan as if to speed up the story, you ran into her buying milk in the shop on the first floor. No: the day after they promoted me to Communications she just showed up at my office out of nowhere and told me that I hadn’t thanked her. When I recovered from my shock I asked her what for. She explained that she’d spoken about me to her husband and for that reason he’d had me called up. She sat down in one of the chairs facing my desk and added: I told him that we’d been very close friends. And what are you doing here? I asked her. We’ve got tickets for the opera but he’s in a meeting. Shall I grab a couple coffees and we can chat while we wait for him? Go get two coffees.

Malik interrupted him, saying, with his eyebrows raised very high: She’s your boss’s wife? Yes. Now I don’t know if I want to hear any more. You sound just like a gringo now. He half-closed his eyes and conceded: Ephphatha! Then continued: So, then you invited her to have lunch another day. No, I didn’t see her again for two or three months: if working in Development Projects leaves you no free time, in Communications your personal life practically doesn’t exist. So then? So my boss got promoted to be director for the Pacific Basin and we threw a cocktail party in his honor, at Old Ebbit’s, a place he really likes because he used to work in the Treasury. On the way to the official naming ceremony he stopped by my office and told me: I’ll see you at the party, bring your wife along. Is yours coming? I asked him. He raised his hands, like he was praying to heaven and answered me: She’s been driving me crazy for weeks, telling me how nice it was to see you, and how she’s dying to meet your wife. By now Malik had finished his brochette, and said: So you hooked up with her right in front of everybody. It wasn’t me: it just happened. We ended up chatting, and by the time I realized it, we were already sharing the same glass. Then she told me that she had a message she’d been keeping for me. What? I asked her. It’s a message passed through saliva, she answered. And she pushed you down on your knees, finished Malik, standing up from the table, and she opened your mouth, and she let fall a drop of her holy water on your tongue. That’s a little bit poetic but you might put it that way. The Sri Lankan glanced at his watch and said: I don’t have to leave yet but the truth is, I don’t want to hear any more.

—Translated from Spanish by Brendan Riley.

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Fedora

2013-05-08T16:06:15Z

by Dayna Tortorici

Image: Jemima Kirke as Jessa on Girls.

Paris was the first to wear the fedora in the way of my thinking, but feels, as founders of a line sometimes do, like a decoy. Her adoption of the men’s hat wasn’t a bellwether so much as an accident, something she happened upon in her personal experiments with costume. Every day was Halloween for Paris. She was literal about social uniforms, and knew how to sexify them according to the rules of her own personal drag: sexy navy, sexy newsboy, sexy farmer, sexy cowboy. Familiar dress was cropped, ripped up, bedazzled, and always topped off with the attendant hat. On Paris, the fedora was sexy Fred Astaire, with a touch of Michael Jackson—something about how the brim offset the narrow slope of her nose, or how she managed to look like a wax replica of herself without appearing dead, as Michael, even while living, looked embalmed. Paris was literal, but the way a dream is literal: a walking wish fulfillment swathed in symbols so obvious they’re comic. All unconscious, she carried the therelessness of Los Angeles in her strut. It took someone with as little nuance as Paris Hilton to bring back the men’s hat as a symbol of modern female sexuality and confused morals. A subtler person would have chosen something else.

Lindsay’s hat was not this way—and to me, the hat began with Lindsay. I would like to know which Hollywood stylist put a fedora on Lindsay Lohan’s head because I think that person is a genius. Lindsay first began to appear in hats after the first cycle of her eating disorder, post-rehab, during her lesbian relationship with Samantha Ronson. It was Lindsay’s funny way of saying that she was the femme—because of course Ronson, a DJ with a UK skater-boy thing, would always out-butch her: tight pants, big shoes, greasy hair tucked back, vampiric dark circles. In photos Samantha was always snarling like a tough orphan, though under the soot and freckles you knew she had nice parents. Instead of just wearing lipstick to imitate a woman, Lindsay wore a fedora to imitate a man imitating a woman—imitating, more specifically, a sort of closeted ’50s homosexual whose excessive display of formal masculinity revealed how much of life was costume. On Lindsay the hat said: Yes, I am experimenting, but not in the way you think. Also: leave me alone. This is an essential quality of hats: they announce one’s desire to be unannounced. A hat is an advertisement for a disguise.

Lindsay courted the paparazzi with her hats, padding around West Hollywood like Carmen Sandiego on house arrest—her skin spray-tan orange with brown creases behind her knees and in the palms of her hands, arms covered in an anorexic down, silky scarves streaming behind her. In my memory they are always at the gas station, Lindsay and Samantha, arguing on the heels of a coke binge, in a car they’re about to drive in the wrong direction on the 110 freeway. Always in men’s hats.

In fact, if not feeling, it was not exactly like this. In old photos I see that Samantha wore a fedora most of the time, though they both would, together, and sometimes, when Sam wasn’t around, Lindsay would alone. Lindsay never wore a hat around Samantha if Samantha was not also wearing a hat. This made it seem like a prosthetic they passed back and forth, like a toy. There was precedent for this: Madonna wore the men’s hat like a strap-on. Marlene Dietrich, Katherine Hepburn, and other Hollywood stars of the 20th century retrospectively accused of lesbianism had more style. They were gentlemen in tails, the ringleaders of a gender circus where they themselves were the lions to tame, so they straddled the chair backwards in victory. In photos, their grin is the grin of a flasher, the smirk of a pervert, of a cannibal licking his fingers. Men had good reason to fear them.

On Samantha—and Lindsay, too—the hat wasn’t so scary. Hepburn, majestic, was a lion; Ronson snarled because she was just a cub. But the hat nevertheless made her comprehensible as a bad influence from the UK, since we already had Pete Doherty in soiled evening dress destroying Kate Moss. The hat was like a cold sore we got from the British sometime around 2005. We still have flare-ups: teetering away from dinner with her lawyers in stilettos, beating back the misdemeanors of her past, Lindsay still wears a fedora, stuck in the year everything went wrong for her.

Because culture is racist, a fedora on anyone “ethnic” signals dirty money and the shame of not knowing how to spend it well. Hats are for organized criminals, pimps and mafia dons, zoot-suiters and the Warren G. “Regulate” video. When Janet Jackson wears a fedora with a short yellow feather stitched into it, the fashion magazine calls it “Lady Mobster.” The fedora peaked, in popularity, with prohibition; on Lindsay it peaked with probation. Lindsay, not only white, was also the most disorganized criminal. She had not a single ally. The hat’s suggestion that there was a gang to which she could belong only called more attention to the loneliness of her brushes with the law.

Power, queerness, privilege, trash, camp, celebrity, anachronism, and crime—the expert coupling of showiness and shame: this is why the fedora belonged to Lindsay.

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A brief interlude for hats in life:

One rainy morning in March, a tall man steps onto the train wearing, on his head, a stiff cherry-red fedora wrapped in clear plastic. His shirt is soaked through, beads of water tremble on the plastic around this magnificent, impervious hat, and it’s amazing—like he’s playing with the action figure still in the packaging. To me it confirms that the hat is no longer an accessory in the sense of a tool (say, for keeping a head dry) but an accessory in the sense of a co-conspirator: hats are everywhere producing bafflement, everywhere punking everyone.

The last Sunday of the month, the barista at the coffee shop is wearing a black felt and beribboned hat for which there is a name. An editor told it to me once, asking if this word was common parlance or just another example of the female writer’s tendency toward over-specificity. He said: Do you know what a “borsalino” is, without using Google? I didn’t. The barista in the borsalino is tall, limby, wearing plum-brown lipstick and adult braces. Taking orders, I can hear that she is either on her way in or out of an English accent. This seems key. On her, the hat works—she pulls it off. There is such thing as hat realness, in the drag sense.

On both of these strangers the absurdity of the hat has an underlying aggression I cannot place. It recalls the murderous dandyism of Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange. Freddy Kruger, too, wore a fedora.

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Fedoras are “for men.” When a woman wears one, it’s meant to be an aberration. The winking transgression—however innocent or innocuous—that’s the whole point.

This seems somewhat defeated when we learn that the first fedora was a woman’s. It was named after the heroine of a 19th-century play—Fédora—who screwed up her love life while happening to wear a hat. Like the contemporary woman, Princess Fédora Romazoff is “passionate and self reliant.” As of the beginning of the play, she has had a disappointing love life, but trusts the man she is about to marry. Naturally, he cheats on her with another man’s wife. When this other man, Loris Japonoff, finds out, he kills Fédora’s fiancé and flees to France. Fédora decides to follow Loris, seduce him, and then kill him. Little does she know that Loris has actually saved her—“saved her from becoming the wife of a miscreant,” in the playwright’s words. This at least is the logic of Fédora. The details—moral, chronological—are ambiguous.

Princess Fédora falls for Loris, but “stifles her love” for the sake of manners, principles, and the rascal she’d hoped to marry. Even in a hat, a woman follows rules where a man does not. Loris addresses Fédora in cryptic doublespeak, suggesting, too subtly, that he has killed her fiancé because he loves her. Not the best reader, Fédora brings tragedy upon herself. She turns Loris in before he has a chance to confess his love. He’s dragged off by French cops; she kills herself “in expiation.”

Female celebrities possess a superhuman ability to set trends, and as Princess Fédora, Sarah Bernhardt—“the most famous actress in the world”—convinced French women to take up the fedora. One wonders if these women also took on some kind of curse. Fédora, the play, with its presumed history of failed loves, its conception of seduction as revenge, its miscommunications and missed connections, is a play about the horrors of dating. The fedora—on television, in the pages of the New York Times style section—is now a universal signifier of women’s romantic troubles. Perhaps it always has been.

Not so long ago the Times ran a story called “The End of Courtship?” Beneath it was a photo. “Denise Hewett says hanging out has replaced dating,” said the caption. Jennifer S. Altman for the New York Times had photographed Denise on a velvety mustard couch in a hotel lobby, wearing a tan fedora with a mustard ribbon for trim. The mustard ribbon matched the mustard couch matched the mustard highlights of Denise’s impeccable blowout. Denise was looking at her phone, texting with two hands, as if handling a Gameboy. She was waiting for her OKCupid date.

Hanna Rosin, corporate psychic, foreseer of the end of men, was brought in for expert opinion. “Many young men these days have no experience in formal dating and feel the need to be faintly ironic about the process,” she told the Times, “to ‘date’ in quotation marks”—because they are “worried that they might offend women by dating in an old-fashioned way.”

In other words, dating is like wearing a hat, available only through irony. Stylists and art directors know this. The image of a young woman wearing a hat signals to the reader: Manners have become so confused—this woman is wearing a hat! There are no mates for her. The fedora is not Monica Lewinsky’s sex-guerrilla beret made sweet with a bow, taking no prisoners with an infantile feminine twist. Nor is it Mary Tyler Moore throwing her beret to the sky—You’re gonna make it after all. We are not sure whether we’re going to make it, in a fedora.

But why a fedora? Princess Fédora does not deserve so much credit. One can only imagine that the women who wear fedoras are acting out a deeper cultural melancholia. Not sadness, but melancholia, in the sense Freud defined in Mourning and Melancholia, as a mechanism for dealing with loss. Without decent romantic prospects, the straight woman suffers an ungrieved loss. She has not lost any actual man—there are still plenty of those—but rather the fantasy of an ideal man, which her sisters have wisely told her is pointless to indulge. This fantasy has meant more than said partner, manifest, ever could, but now it’s a bad look; it’s another era’s out-of-fashion false consciousness, not to be worn. Denied the right to atavistically yearn for letters and sodas, the woman in the hat retains the fantasy of wanting a Perfect Man—a dominant man who will carry her across the threshold, call her on the phone and not text “sup” after eleven—by adopting his characteristics. By adopting his hat.

In order to preserve him, she must become him. This may or may not have been what Gloria Steinem had in mind when she said, “We are becoming the men we wanted to marry.” But the signal is complicated. This woman does not wear a fedora to say that she wants Don Draper. She wears a fedora to say, I want a man who is like a woman in a hat. That is, the best of both men and women; I want Feminist Ryan Gosling. She sustains the dime-store, midcentury masculine hero by taking on his dress as her own, but idealizes it all the more by feminizing it—since the problem with those men all along, the men in fedoras, was that they were nothing but money, manners, and chivalry. Their precise appeal rested on their chauvinism, a chauvinism that a woman today, wearing the hat and the pants, no longer accepts. This is where the hapless men who think they can trick women into finding them sexy or desirable by wearing a fedora make a serious misstep. Perceiving a vacuum in the market, this OKCupid subset acts the part of Lothario by posting fedora selfies with captions like “as a side note . . . I do own a toy collection to use on another for their delight.” This is the worst kind of man—fronting, opportunistic. The kind of man who picks you up at a funeral. Little do they realize: the funeral is their own.

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Is the young woman in a fedora like princess Fédora, unhappy in love and yet naively hopeful for its future, seeking revenge—or is she like Lindsay, wearing a hat for confusion, fun, disguise, experiment? Is she drawn to the miscreant on OKCupid and incapable of seeing the truly loyal man whose principles keep him from rakishily, untowardly, taking what he wants for his own—or is she just trying on girls for a while? The woman in a hat does waste time on a detective game, in her Private Investigator outfit, hunting revenge for some past hurt and applying her interpretive skills to the wrong text. There is something tragic about her, and certainly about Lindsay. Stuck in the sun-in past of her child-star potential, when she was promised everything and it was all in front of her, she is an amnesiac, still paying old dues—going on dates, getting fired from bad movies. Lindsay still wears hats, but has gone on to date men. Men much worse for her than Samantha.

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What Do You Desire?

2013-05-06T15:08:51Z

by Emily Witt

Image: Photo by Sam Breach, September 26, 2010.

This article appears in Issue 16: Double Bind, available now. Subscribe with the code DESIRE to receive 10 percent off a four-issue subscription.

On a Monday last April, I stood in line at JFK Airport to board a plane to San Francisco. Before me stood a silver-headed West Coast businessman. His skin had the exfoliated, burnished sheen of the extremely healthy; his glasses were of an advanced polymer; he had dark jeans. He wore the recycled ethylene-vinyl acetate shoes that are said never to smell. His fleece coat was of an extraordinary thickness and quality, with a lissome external layer that would not pill. He seemed like the sort of man who would pronounce himself a minimalist and say that everything he bought was selected for its extraordinary craftsmanship and beautiful design. But the silver fox’s computer bag was a cheap thing with netting and buckles that said GOOGLE on it. The person in front of him in line wore a Google doodle T-shirt with Bert and Ernie where the Os would be. In front of him was a Google backpack.

Until I left San Francisco it never went away. It was embroidered on breast pockets, illustrated with themes of America’s cities, emblazoned on stainless-steel water bottles, on fleece jackets, on baseball caps, but not on the private coach buses that transported workers to their campus in Mountain View, where they ate raw goji-berry discs from their snack room and walked about swathed, priestlike, in Google mantles, with Google wimples and Google mitres, seeking orientation on Google Maps, Googling strangers and Google chatting with friends, as I did with mine, dozens of times a day, which made the recurrence of the logo feel like a supremacist taunt.

My first day in the city I sat in a sunlit café in the Mission District, drank a cappuccino, and read a paper copy of the San Francisco Chronicle that lay anachronistically on the counter. I overheard someone talking about his lunch at the Googleplex. “Quinoa cranberry pilaf,” I wrote down. And then, “coregasm.” Because that was the subsequent topic of discussion: women who have spontaneous orgasms during yoga. The barista was saying how wonderful it was that the issue was receiving attention, coregasms being something a lot of women experienced and were frightened to talk about. Those days were over.

The people of San Francisco were once famous for their refusal of deodorant and unnecessary shearing. Sometimes, walking down the street, past gay construction workers and vibrator stores, I was reminded that this was the place where Harvey Milk was elected (and assassinated), where the bathhouses had flourished (and closed). But most of the time I noticed only that the people of San Francisco appeared to have been suffused with unguents and botanical salves, polished with salts, and scented with the aromatherapeutics sold in the shops that lined Valencia Street. The air smelled of beeswax, lavender, and verbena, and the sidewalks in the Mission glittered on sunny days. The food was exquisite. There was a place in Hayes Valley that made liquid-nitrogen ice cream to order. I watched my ice cream magically pressured into existence with a burst of vapor and a pneumatic hiss. This miracle, as the world around me continued apace, just moms with Google travel coffee mugs talking about lactation consultants. Online, people had diverted the fear of sin away from coregasms and toward their battles against sugar and flour. “Raw, organic honey, local ghee, and millet chia bread taming my gluten lust,” was a typical dispatch. “Thank goodness for ancient grains.”

At night I was alone, and I would walk down the street listening to sermons in Spanish from the storefront churches and the electronic hum of the BART train below. The city was a dream world of glowing screens and analog fetishism, of Google, orgasms, stone fruits, and sparkles. A Greek chorus of the homeless and mentally ill connected these fragments into deeper conspiracies, until I began to see conspiracies myself. I would walk down the sidewalks of the Mission and note their glittery resemblance to my powdered blush in its makeup compact. “This sidewalk looks like Super Orgasm,” I would think, Super Orgasm being the name of the particular shade of blush I own. My makeup reveled in contemporary sexual politics: FOR HIM & HER read the sticker on the back of my paraben-free foundation. I contemplated a possible economic index comparing the cost of a pint of honey-lavender ice cream to the federal minimum hourly wage. I ran to Golden Gate Park, where giant birds of prey gazed hungrily upon glossy dachshunds. The cyclists passed in shoals, dressed in Google bicycle jerseys.

I had never had a coregasm and my sexual expectations conformed to widely held, government-sanctioned ideals. I was single, and now in my thirties, but I still envisioned my sexual experience eventually reaching a terminus, like a monorail gliding to a stop at Epcot Center. I would disembark, find myself face-to-face with another human being, and there we would remain in our permanent station in life: the future.

In San Francisco, people thought differently. They sought to unlink the family from a sexual foundation of two people. They believed in intentional communities that could successfully disrupt the monogamous heterosexual norm. They gave their choices names and they conceived of their actions as social movements. I had come to San Francisco to observe this sexual vanguard, but I did not think their lessons applied to me. “But what is your personal journey?” they would ask, and I would joke about this later with my friends.

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Public Disgrace is an online pornography series that advertises itself as “women bound, stripped, and punished in public.” It is the creation of a 30-year-old San Francisco–based porn director and dominatrix named Princess Donna Dolore. Princess Donna conceived of the project in 2008, during her fourth year of working for the pornography company Kink.com. In addition to directing, Donna performs in the shoots, though she is not usually the lead.

When Princess Donna is scouting locations for Public Disgrace she looks for small windows (they need to be blacked out) and spaces (they need to look crowded). For outdoor shoots she usually works in Europe, where public obscenity laws are more forgiving. Before each shoot, Princess Donna coordinates with the female lead to establish what she likes or doesn’t like and produces a checklist of what the performer will take from her civilian audience. Some models are happy only with groping, some have rules against slapping, and some are willing to go so far as to be fingered or spit on by the audience.

For female performers, the draw of Public Disgrace lies in Donna’s directorial prowess. Princess Donna is an experienced orchestrator of complicated fantasies of group sex, public sex, and violent sex. Such situations tend to be, as Princess Donna puts it, “kind of tricky to live out in real life.” She is also a deft manipulator of the human body. Female performers trust her to extend the boundaries of their physical capacities.

The job description for Public Disgrace, posted at Kink.com, reads: “Sex between male dominant and female submissive; domination by female and male dom; secure bondage, gags, hoods, fondling, flogging, and forced orgasms with vibrators.” For four to five hours of work, performers earn between $1,100 and $1,300, plus bonuses for extra sex acts with cameo performers who can show a clean bill of health.

A week after I arrived in San Francisco, I attended a Public Disgrace shoot. The shoots are open to the public, a public that’s encouraged to actively participate. Novelty is important to the world of porn, so audience members are recruited through the internet but restricted to attending one shoot a year.

The venue of the shoot I attended, a bar called Showdown, was on a side street haunted by drug addicts and the mentally ill just south of the Tenderloin, next to a Vietnamese sandwich shop and a flophouse called the Winsor Hotel (REASONABLE RATES DAILY-WEEKLY). When I arrived, several people were standing under the red arrow outlined in yellow lightbulbs above the entrance, waiting to get in, including a group of young men and a heterosexual couple in their thirties. We signed releases, showed our photo IDs, and a production assistant took a mug shot of each of us holding our driver’s license next to our face. Then she gave us each two drink tickets that could be redeemed at the bar. “Depending on how wasted everyone seems to be I will give you more,” she promised.

+ + +

That evening’s performer, a diminutive blonde who goes by the stage name Penny Pax, flew up to San Francisco from her home in Los Angeles especially for the Public Disgrace shoot. She had told Donna that one of the first pornos she ever watched was Public Disgrace, and since she got into the business herself she had been anxious to make one. Her personal request for the evening was that Princess Donna attempt to anally fist her.

The bar was a narrow room with a sense of history attached to it, of an older San Francisco that was a working-class mix of Irish and Italian immigrants. Old-fashioned smoked-glass lamps hung over the wooden bar. A color-copied picture of Laura Palmer from David Lynch’s television show Twin Peaks hung on the wall, next to a stopped clock with a fake bird’s nest in the cavity where a pendulum should have been. Behind the front area with the bar was a dark square room with black wallpaper patterned with alternating illustrations of two parrots on perches and a vase of flowers. The crew from Kink had rigged lighting overhead.

Princess Donna arrived with a small entourage, wearing a vacuum-tight black minidress that flattered her exceptionally perfect breasts. Donna is an extraordinary physical presence in any group of people, and her stature plays integrally into her authority. She is five foot seven with long, almost alarmingly thin limbs that make her seem taller. She has large, brown, Bambi-ish eyes that, the night of the shoot, were complexly shadowed and wreathed in fake eyelashes, which Kink purchases in quantities of several hundred at a time. Her long brown hair was tied up in a high ponytail. She has a tattoo of a biologically correct heart on her left shoulder and a cursive inscription that says DADDY on her inner right forearm. She strode into the room carrying a black vinyl purse from which a riding crop protruded. With her minidress she wore tan cowboy boots, which made the length of her legs appear heron-like. A neck bruise the size of a silver dollar that I had noticed during my first meeting with her a week before had faded.

Donna stood before the bar with the palindromically stage-named male performer, Ramon Nomar, surveying the room. He pointed up to several hooks on the ceiling and to a metal Juliet balcony over the bar. Donna nodded without a word. They retreated to the back. I asked a production assistant where the female performer was. Penny Pax, she said, was having “quiet time.”

Soon, the music was silenced (Kink had its own music, cleared of rights, to play). The bartender removed his gingham shirt and his tie and suddenly was wearing nothing but his waistcoat. Donna came out to make some announcements to the assembled crowd, which was well on its way to getting soused.

“You might think we are doing things to the model that are mean or humiliating, but don’t,” said Donna. “She’s signed an agreement.” According to the agreement, the crowd had permission to poke the model, fondle her, and finger her, but only if they washed their hands and had neatly trimmed fingernails. A fingernail trimmer was available if necessary. “I’m going to be watching you like a hawk to make sure you’re not doing degrading things to her pussy,” Donna said. She continued: “You’re allowed to spit on her chest but not her face. You can give her a hard spanking but you are not allowed to give her a hard smack.” She pulled her production assistant over to her physically. “If Kat is the model”—here Kat bent over obligingly—“this would be a reasonable distance from which to spank her.” Donna mimed responsible spanking practice.

The model, Donna went on to explain, could not leave the set bruised because she had another shoot coming up this week. Donna said that therefore at some point she might have to forbid certain practices to ensure Penny’s body remained unmarked.

Donna concluded her speech with a more theoretical exposition. The whole point of Public Disgrace, she explained, is that it’s supposed to seem spontaneous, and that “you guys are not supposed to know that we’re coming here.” Taking video was forbidden, photographs with phones were fine, but the most important thing: “Don’t ignore us. I’m going to walk her in with a sign that says I'M A WORTHLESS CUNT. So react to that.” She repeated that nail clippers and files were available for anyone who wanted them and reminded the audience to wash their hands in the bathroom before touching the model. Then she returned to the back room.

A few minutes later Donna emerged with Penny Pax and Ramon in tow. Penny was small, just over five feet tall, with full natural breasts, milky white skin, and a chin-length bob of cornsilk blond. Her eyes were the rich azure of a blue raspberry Blow Pop. She was very pretty, and decidedly not plastic or spray-tanned. She looked like a model in a JCPenney catalog. She wore a denim miniskirt, white high heels, and a white tank top. Donna looked her over, then deftly pulled the straps of Penny’s tank top off her arms and folded them down. She spun Penny around, unhooked her white padded bra, and tossed it to one side. From a black duffel bag under a table Donna picked up and put back various coils of rope, judging the weight and length of each one. Meanwhile Ramon stared—the only word for it is lovingly—at Penny’s breasts, which hung pendulously down, stretch marks visible. Grabbing them, Donna executed a complicated-looking tie, uplifting the breasts to bra elevation by winding the rope around each one. She pulled the straps of Penny’s tank top back over her shoulders, then tied Penny’s arms behind her back.

“Look at that,” said Donna, surveying her work and turning Penny around. “You look gorgeous.” Meanwhile Ramon stepped in and looked over Penny with the tender carnivorousness of a dime-store bodice-ripper. He ran his hand over Penny’s body from behind, turned her around and examined her, kissed and inhaled her hair, then put his hand up her skirt and began feeling her while staring intently at her body. This was his way of preparing for the shoot. Ramon was from Spain and had a sharp accent. He rarely smiled. He wore a tight black T-shirt that showed off his impressive pectorals, black pants, and black combat boots. He was just over six feet tall, tan, and sculpted like an Iberian Bruce Willis. This was an attractive couple. Donna hung a sign, which indeed read I’M A WORTHLESS CUNT, around Penny’s neck, then grabbed Penny roughly by the hair and took her out the door.

Now the cameras were recording. Now we could redeem our drink tickets. The bar was full, mostly with men. These men I would divide into two groups: the openly slavering, confident about the righteousness of their lust, and the self-conscious, worried about breaking the taboos of touching and insulting a woman. They were joined by a smattering of females, some of whom were there with their boyfriends, others who had come together in pairs. Donna had exchanged her cowboy boots for patent leather high heels and now strode through the door purposefully, she and Ramon on either side of Penny, who looked up at her tall handlers with baleful blue eyes.

“Tell everybody why you’re here,” ordered Donna, as the people drinking at the bar feigned surprise. “I’m a worthless cunt!” said Penny. Using some kind of professional wrestling trick, Ramon lifted her up by her neck and sat her on the bar. Working together, Donna and Ramon stuffed a cocktail napkin in her mouth and taped it into a gag, taking turns slapping her on her face and her breasts. They ripped off her spotless white tank top. The rope had cut off circulation to Penny’s breasts and they looked painfully swollen.

“Who wants to touch it?” asked Donna. “Who wants to play with this worthless little cunt?” The bar patrons obligingly hit, fingered, and spanked her. From her handbag, from which the riding crop still menacingly protruded, Donna now withdrew a device that crepitated electric sparks and started shocking Penny with it. Ramon removed what remained of Penny’s clothes, then his belt, and began gently swiping it at Penny, who was soon pinioned on the floor.

“I thought it was your dream,” goaded Donna. “I thought it was your dream to shoot for this site. You didn’t come ready?” She looked around the room. “What’s her name?” she demanded. “Everyone knows what her name is.”

“Worthless cunt!” yelled the crowd.

“What pretty girl wants to grab her titties?” A woman in attendance obliged. Ramon took off his pants, balancing on each foot as he pulled them over his combat boots. He was not wearing any underwear; his penis looked like the trunk of a palm tree. The bar patrons burst into applause.

He picked Penny up and had sex with her against the bar as the extras continued to smack at her breasts. Penny, still gagged, was wide-eyed. Her mascara had begun to run in rivers down her face. She had the option of halting everything with verbal and nonverbal cues but she did not exercise it. Suddenly Donna stopped the show. “Everyone, I have an announcement,” Donna said, as she removed the ropes still tied around Penny’s breasts. “No more smacking this boob,” she said, pointing to the right one, which had red marks on it. They resumed shooting.

Ramon, who had biceps like cannons, hoisted Penny around the room and the crowd followed, vying with one another for a good sightline. He was able to walk around holding Penny in one arm, wielding the zapper in the other. “Zap me!” requested a male audience member. Ramon rolled his eyes and did so without breaking rhythm. “Ouch,” said the guy, looking sore. Ramon removed Penny’s gag and guided her into a blowjob, during which Penny theatrically gagged. Donna stood by, slapping and shocking, and then tag-teamed in. Using her hands, she made Penny ejaculate, to the delight of the crowd. After fifteen or twenty minutes, Donna called for a break.

Paused in the middle of his exertions Ramon looked up at the ceiling with a look of super-intense concentration. Penny was on the floor. He picked her up and sat her on the bar. He and Donna tenderly tucked her hair back from her face and wiped off her sweat and the grime from the floor with Cottonelles. Donna, like a trainer during a boxing match, removed Penny’s false eyelashes, gave her water, and kissed her on the cheek. During this reprieve from shooting, the crowd, which had been as verbally abusive as directed, seemed sheepish.

“You are beautiful and I’d take you to meet my mother!” yelled one man who had been particularly enthusiastic about yelling “worthless cunt.” Ramon asked for a drink. “What do you want?” said the bartender. “A soda,” said Ramon. “Porno guy wants a soda!” echoed the loud man.

When shooting resumed, a female audience member, heavily tattooed and wearing a miniskirt and a ragged T-shirt that had two skeletal hands printed across her breasts, had a go at Penny’s body. Things continued in this way for more than an hour. Chairs were knocked over. Drinks were spilled. The bartender had by now removed his vest and was shirtless. The crowd was drunk and excited, although not entirely unembarrassed. “Make that bitch choke,” shouted the shouty man. Then: “Sorry!”

Donna began to wind things down. “OK guys,” she said, to prepare the audience, “the pot shot’s not the end though.” The crowd cheered. With the cameras off, Ramon and Penny had vanilla missionary sex on a table to get to the point where he could ejaculate. He nodded when he was ready, then put Penny on the floor, and masturbated until he came on her face. Again the room burst into applause.

The performers took a break. Ramon’s job was now done. With the room’s attention focused on Penny he yanked off his sweaty T-shirt, flung it into a corner, and wandered off into a dark part of the bar, naked but for his combat boots. Like a long-distance runner who has just crossed the finish line, he walked it off, moving his arms in circles, wiping the sweat from his face with his arm, and taking deep breaths. Nobody noticed him. Eventually he recovered his composure, toweled off, and put his black jeans back on. Penny, meanwhile, rested primly on a chair and sipped water. Her expression was, in a word, elated.

I joined Donna at the bar. What was going to happen next?

“I want to get my hand all the way in her ass,” she said. “She’s never done that before and she wants to try it.”

Princess Donna sat Penny Pax down on a bar table. She had a Hitachi Magic Wand and a bottle of lubricant. “I need all the room that’s in her holes for my hand,” she announced, and the audience deferentially took a step back. After Donna accomplished her task, the crowd chanted, “Squirt, squirt, squirt, squirt,” and then Penny did. I watched all this from a corner, standing next to Ramon, who had a towel around his bronzed shoulders and was drinking a bottle of pilsner.

Shooting was coming to a close. Donna and Ramon moved Penny back to the bar and strung her up by her wrists to the metal balcony. I saw Donna in a corner, carefully wiping down a beer bottle with a sanitizing wipe. And that was the final shot of the evening: Penny tied up and suspended from the railings of the balcony by her wrists, while a member of the audience penetrated her with a beer bottle. Ramon, now shirtless and in jeans, casually sparked the zapper across his pectoral muscles a couple of times, then reached out and zapped Penny on the tongue she offered to him with a scream. Then it was done. With a debonair flourish, Ramon effortlessly picked up the tiny starlet and carried her out of the room in his arms.

+ + +

Kink interviews its female performers before and after every shoot. It’s a de-escalation strategy that reminds the viewer—if he watches it (Kink does not release the demographics of its audience, but studies have found that 98 percent of paid porn is watched by men)—of the controlled conditions of what he just watched, and confirms that the activity was consensual and that the model has recovered. Penny wandered out for her postgame interview wearing pink glasses, a gray bathrobe, and a pair of Uggs. But for her smeary mascara, she looked like a college student on her way to a dormitory bathroom. Donna arranged Penny’s bathrobe to reveal her breasts. Other than that, like most postgame interviews with athletes, this one was a little bland.

DONNA

So, Penny, how did you enjoy the shoot this evening?

PENNY

I had a great time, it was amazing. There was so much going on.

HECKLING AUDIENCE MEMBER #1

I actually want to take you out for lunch later!

HECKLING AUDIENCE MEMBER #2

You have really pretty eyes!

DONNA

All right everybody, hold on. Tell me what your favorite parts were.

PENNY

Probably, uh, just the getting handled by everyone and not really knowing how many hands were on me, or who was touching me . . . And then the—I don’t know, did you get your fist in my butt?

DONNA

I did.

PENNY

Well, that was awesome. Yay! I can’t wait to see it!

DONNA

Yeah, that was rad. Round of applause for the anal fisting!

Audience applauds.

DONNA

And you also said that you had never squirted like that before?

PENNY

Yeah, that was ridiculous. How did you do that?

DONNA

Magic fingers. Years of practice.

PENNY

Yeah, it was amazing.

DONNA

What were the most challenging parts?

PENNY

Uh, probably putting your fist in my butt? That was pretty challenging. It felt really full.

DONNA

On a scale of one to ten, how would you rate your happiness leaving the shoot?

PENNY

Eleven!

Applause. Whistles.

DONNA

So is it safe to say that you would come back and shoot for the site again?

PENNY

Yes.

DONNA

Do you want a shower?

Penny Pax nods.

DONNA

Let’s get you a shower!

MALE AUDIENCE MEMBER

A golden shower!

FEMALE AUDIENCE MEMBER

Can I come?

After this conclusion, Penny and I retreated to a stairwell behind the bar. Penny, I learned, is 23 years old. I asked if she had been working in the industry since she was 18. No, she said, she wishes. She had only been in the industry for six months. Before working in porn she was a lifeguard in Fort Lauderdale. Being a lifeguard in Fort Lauderdale had been pretty boring. I asked her about the shoot. I wanted to know how it had felt.

“It’s a little uncomfortable in the beginning, for the anal,” she said. (She was presumably referring to a moment early in the shoot when Ramon jumped up on the bar, stuffed a lemon in Penny’s mouth, and had anal sex with her. “Nice boots, man!” someone in the audience yelled. Penny made a nonverbal cue to slow down and Donna jumped over and slathered her with lubricant.) “But my body warms up pretty quickly and then there’s no discomfort.” Slightly incredulous, I asked if there were moments then of genuine pleasure. She looked at me like I was crazy. “Yeah. Like the whole thing! The whole thing.” She apologized for not being more articulate and explained she was in a state of delirium. “We call it ‘dick drunk.’”

+ + +

I rode back to the Mission in a van with Donna and Penny and Ramon. Penny and Ramon were both sleeping over at the landmarked Moorish castle that houses Kink. They usually work in mainstream porn in San Fernando Valley, but enjoy coming to San Francisco. In the shoot he was doing tomorrow for New Sensations in Los Angeles, Ramon lamented, they wouldn’t even let him pull the girl’s hair. I surmised that making more extreme pornography if you’re a performer is like wanting to write like Beckett if you’re a writer.

I left Penny and Ramon wandering the lobby in their gray bathrobes and stepped out into the cold San Francisco night. I walked west to Valencia Street, where I found a scene of unexpected destruction. Broken glass filled the sidewalks. The windows of every storefront—TACA Airlines, an adjacent property management company, the boutique after that, and on down the street—had been shattered. The windshields of the cars lining the street had been systematically bludgeoned. A new apartment complex under construction had FUCK THIS SHIT spray-painted on a column. I stared at the hanging fragments of glass and the garbage bins tipped over on the sidewalk. Then I crossed to the undamaged side of the street and bought myself an ice cream sandwich. I asked the cashier what had happened. He described a dozen protesters dressed in black. The following day was May 1. I knew strikes were planned in Oakland, but on this side of the Bay nobody had seemed particularly interested in Occupy Wall Street.

I took some photos of the destruction and posted them to the websites of the great technology corporations with written exclamations of bafflement. Then I deleted the posts. I tried to think about the sex I had just watched. In the early years of broadband internet, Frontline had made a documentary called “American Porn.” (“It’s a multibillion-dollar industry—and growing. In a wired world, can anything stop it?”) After interviewing various porn industry stalwarts, the male anchor had attended a shoot not unlike the one I just watched and had walked out in disgust. While I certainly worried about what I had seen, I could not find it in myself to feel that level of indignation. I ate my ice cream sandwich and went to sleep.

+ + +

Over the course of the next several weeks I watched Princess Donna direct and star in more films. I watched her perform in a roller-derby-themed episode of a series called Fucking Machines where she wielded a drill retrofitted with a giant dildo. I watched her train for her new role as director of a Kink property called Ultimate Surrender, a girl-on-girl wrestling tournament. For three eight-minute rounds, two women wrestled each other. The goal was for one woman to pin the other and molest her for as long as possible. For the fourth round, the winner has sex with the loser wearing a strap-on dildo. It’s one of Kink’s most popular properties and is sometimes shot before a live studio audience. Princess Donna also directs a series called Bound Gangbangs, and one day was inspired to do a shoot where all the men were dressed as panda bears. I watched this too, and was surprised to find it beautiful.

I, personally, was not having sex while all this was going on. Not that the sex I would’ve had, if I’d been having sex, would’ve been anything like the sex that was going on at the Kink castle. The Kink actors were more like athletes, or stuntmen and -women performing punishing feats, and part of what fascinated me was the ease with which they went in and out of it, the comfort with which they inhabited their bodies, their total self-assurance and sense of unity against those who condemned their practice. I possessed none of those qualities.

I had made no conscious decision to be single, but love is rare and it is frequently unreciprocated. Because of this, people around me continued to view love as a sort of messianic event, and my friends expressed a religious belief that it would arrive for me one day, as if love was something the universe owed to each of us, which no human could escape. I had known love, but having known love I knew how powerless I was to instigate it or ensure its duration. Whether love was going to arrive or not, I could not suspend my life in the expectation of its arrival. So, back in New York, I was single, but only very rarely would more than a few weeks pass without some kind of sexual encounter.

What even to call these relationships? Most of my friends had slept with one another and I had slept with many friends, too. Sometimes years separated sexual encounters. Things thought buried in the past would cycle around again, this time with less anxiety and greater clarity, in a fluid manner that occasionally imploded in horrible displays of pain or temporary insanity, but which for the most part functioned smoothly. We were souls flitting through limbo, piling up against one another like dried leaves, circling around, awaiting the messiah.

After a decade or so of living this way, with occasional suspensions for relationships that would first revive my belief in romantic love and its attendant structures of domesticity, and then once again fail and extinguish them, I started finding it difficult to revere the couple as the fundamental unit of society. I became a little ornery about it, to be honest: that couples paid lower taxes together, that they could afford better apartments, that there were so few structures of support to ease the raising of a child as a single person, that the divorced experience a sense of failure, that failed marriages are accompanied by so much logistical stress on top of the emotional difficulties. All this because we privilege a certain idea of love. The thought of the natural progression of couples, growing more and more insular, buying nicer and nicer furniture, shutting down the world, accruing things, relaxing into habit, scared me. As I grew older, I found it difficult to distinguish romantic love from other kinds of connections: the platonic love for the friends I did not want to have sex with, the euphoric chemical urges toward people I had sex with but did not love. Why was love between couples more exceptional? Because it attached itself to material objects, and to children? Because it ordered civilization? I probably would not have a baby without love, and buying a home seemed impossible for all kinds of reasons, but I could have sex. I had a body.

A few weeks before I decided I should go to California and watch people make porn, this revised outlook toward my prospects—that I did not need to see my life as an unanswered question, in permanent suspension for the answer of a relationship—resulted in deliberate immersion in New York’s sexual fray. A relationship had ended, I kept running into old friends, I was internet dating; it was all happening. Then all of it imploded. First, I inadvertently caused someone emotional devastation. Second, I was told I might have been exposed to chlamydia. Third, I therefore might have given chlamydia to someone else. Fourth, and this really was the worst part, I received an email from an acquaintance that accused me of destroying her friend’s relationship.

The next day, sitting in the packed waiting room of a public health clinic in Brooklyn for the un- and underinsured, I watched a clinician lecture her captive, half-asleep audience on how to put on a condom. We waited for our numbers to be called. In this cold, adult daylight, I examined what I had done. I thought about the suggestion, in the email from my acquaintance, that I “stop pantomiming thrills” and “starkly consider the real, human consequences of my real-life actions.” A single person’s need for human contact should not be underestimated. Surrounded on all sides by my imperfect fellow Americans, I thought many were also probably here for having broken some rules about prudent behavior. At the very least, I figured, most people in the room knew how to use condoms.

The clinician responded with equanimity to the occasional jeers from the crowd. She respectfully said “no” when a young woman asked if a female condom could be used “in the butt.” After her lecture, while we continued to wait, public health videos played on loop on monitors mounted on the wall. They dated from the 1990s, and dramatized people with lives as disorderly as mine, made worse by the outdated blue jeans they wore. The brows of these imperfect people furrowed as they accepted diagnoses, admitted to affairs, and made confessional phone calls on giant cordless phones. Men picked each other up in stage-set bars with one or two extras in fake conversation over glass tumblers as generic music played in the background to signify a party-like atmosphere, like a porn that never gets to the sex. They later reflected on events in Real World–style confessional interviews. From our chairs, all facing forward in the same direction, awaiting our swabbing and bloodletting, we witnessed the narrative consequences. (One of the men has a girlfriend! And gonorrhea! Now he has to tell his girlfriend that he’s bisexual and that he has gonorrhea!) The videos did not propose long-term committed relationships as a necessary condition of adulthood, just honesty. They did not recriminate. The New York City government had a technocratic view of sexuality.

The federal government had different expectations. Following the phone call I had looked up chlamydia on Google, which led me to the website for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The government suggested that the best way to avoid chlamydia was “to abstain from vaginal, anal, and oral sex or to be in a long-term mutually monogamous relationship with a partner who has been tested and is known to be uninfected.” Porn might be a fantasy, but at least it is not a fantasy that defies all interpretation. The suggestion of abstinence came with a more realistic reminder to use condoms. I usually used condoms, but this time I had not used a condom, so now I used antibiotics. When the lab results came back weeks after my visit to the Brooklyn clinic it turned out I did not have chlamydia. None of us had chlamydia.

Still, I didn’t have sex again for nearly seven months.

+ + +

The women at Kink came to porn for various reasons. Bobbi Starr, a 29-year-old who won Adult Video News’s Female Performer of the Year award in 2012, was raised in a Pentecostal Christian family in San Jose, California, and was homeschooled until middle school. She trained as a swimmer, competed in the Junior Olympics, and earned a scholarship to study music at San Jose State University. Although she had always considered herself sexually adventurous, she was 22 years old and working as a classical musician when she watched porn for the first time. Sitting down with a male friend, who was surprised at her lack of awareness, she watched several videos, including one called Bong Water Butt Babes. Very little needs to be said about this video except that the bedroom set is covered in sheets of plastic. Starr was mesmerized, applied for a job at Kink, enjoyed the bondage work, and within a year got an agent and moved to Los Angeles.

I asked her about pain. She recalled an “authentic BDSM experience” she had with a Kink dominatrix named Maitresse Madeline. “I had my head in the pit and she was flogging me and caning me and single-tailing me and doing all these really, really intense corporal activities with me and then she started tickling me and I just completely broke,” she said. “At some point I came out and just cried on her chest and then she started crying.” She described the experience as cathartic. “Through her dominating me and me subbing to her we had this really unique experience. I think that she and I are better partners, we have a better working relationship because of it, I think we have a better friendship because of it, I think it’s easier for us to communicate.”

One day, I watched Princess Donna have her makeup done for a shoot with the porn phenom James Deen. (The first male porn star of the internet age to amass a vocally enthusiastic following among women, James Deen’s popularity seems explicable not by his slight physique but by the way he gazes at his partners and whispers urgently in their ears—he manages to convey genuine, ardent desire. In real life he reminded me of the boy in the eighth grade who went around snapping girls’ bra straps.) Another model wandered in, a lanky woman wearing hot pants and a bra that enclosed each breast in its own beribboned dirndl. A tattooed tendril of morning glories climbed the length of her very long leg. Donna introduced her to me as Rain DeGrey, and told me that she, Donna, had directed Rain’s first shoot five years ago.

We went into a sort of lounge in the next room that had wall-to-wall carpeting and sofas. On one sofa a young woman with wet hair, wearing a gray bathrobe, barely out of adolescence if at all, sat painting her toenails a vivid sapphire. Her stage name was Katherine Cane. Rain DeGrey sat on a chair in front of me, applying sedimentary layers of Jergen’s bronzer as we talked.

Rain DeGrey described herself as a “24–7 lifestyle kinkster” and “pansexual.” She told me that for years she had denied the fact that bondage and flogging turned her on. She knew that even in the Bay Area it was not something you could just tell people, that she would be judged for her preference.

“Finally you’re like, ‘Hey, it’s OK if normies think I’m a freak,’” she told me. “And the day that I came out as kinky I felt fifty pounds lighter.” One day, she was tied up in her local dungeon, The Citadel, getting flogged by a friend, when someone suggested she try to do some of this stuff professionally.

Her first shoot was for the Kink site Wired Pussy, which at the time was under Donna’s direction. For the first scene they shot together, Donna stood over Rain DeGrey with a cattle prod. Donna told her if she moved the shoot would end.

“I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to sit still on your hands and knees and not move while someone cattle prods you,” said Rain.

Five years later, Rain DeGrey, who does not have a college degree, has bought herself a four-bedroom house with her earnings from Kink. She is very grateful to Donna for her counsel and support.

“I was actually on set for her Bound Gangbangs that she did, where she took on eight dicks.” Rain stood up. She proceeded to demonstrate a play-by-play of everything that had happened, which ended with Donna on the floor, “this little, limp, sweaty, fucked rag doll. James Deen’s just kicking her as hard as he can and she loves it.”

Rain DeGrey returned to her chair and resumed her ceaseless application of self-tanning lotion. The chemical baby-powder scent of it wafted over us. I said nothing.

“I don’t know if you’ve ever had cum in your eyes?” she asked.

“No,” I said.

“That’s like a super-duper hard limit for me,” said Katherine Cane, shaking her head in dismay.

“It blinds you,” said Rain.

“It stings horribly,” said Katherine.

“Do you realize the dedication that takes?” asked Rain. “That’s how committed she is.”

Committed to what? To getting guys sitting in their studio apartments to jerk off to you for $30 a month? Not an insignificant accomplishment, but enacting a fantasy of violence for personal reasons was one thing; doing so for money was another. I held my tongue, and Rain continued.

“We’re told our entire lives how fragile and delicate our bodies are,” she said. She adopted a tone of mock concern. “‘Don’t go out late at night, someone might mug you.’ ‘You’ve got to be careful, bad things will happen to you.’ And there’s a certain liberation in challenging your body, and getting beaten or distressed in some way and realizing you’re actually tougher than you realized.”

She looked over at Katherine, who had finished her pedicure and had her toes out in front of her. “Know what I mean?”

“Exactly,” Katherine responded.

“It is a very empowering experience to realize you’re not as fragile as you’ve been told your whole life,” said Rain.

“But it’s just as empowering to let yourself break down, in my opinion, because you go to a place that is so vulnerable and scary that a lot of people don’t want to acknowledge it because it’s your weakest point possible,” said Katherine.

“The vulnerability,” agreed Rain.

“Like you’re safe to be your completely base, your most broken-down, crying, you can’t even talk.”

I didn’t say anything, but here’s what I thought: there was no great truth about the human condition that I would discover through celibacy.

+ + +

Princess Donna makes a lot of porn: on average she does a couple of shoots a week, and she’s been directing for eight years. Unsurprisingly, she sometimes gets bored and wants to try something different. When Princess Donna proposes a project, her boss, Kink CEO Peter Acworth, must approve it. Sometimes there are conflicts. Early in her career Donna proposed doing a series called Dirty Girls, which she described to me as “like girl–girl sex, but like rough sex, but not with, like, a dom/sub relationship but just like going at it, with like fisting and spitting and dunking people’s heads in toilets, lots of anal, stuff like that.” Acworth decided not to give the green light, but Kink thought the request was interesting enough that they posted an online debate between Donna and Acworth.

PETER

So the fisting is really the most important thing to you.

DONNA

Clearly a lot of people like fisting and girls dominating each other and spitting on each other. It’s still pretty extreme.

PETER

I don’t know how much for the male customers . . . you know for the male viewer I don’t know how much fisting actually adds to it.

DONNA

I’ve had so many male viewers ask me for fisting. Like on Insex [Donna’s previous employer] when I worked there they were always like, yeah, “fisting fisting fisting fisting.” I think there’s a lot of guys who think fisting is hot. I think you don’t think it’s hot.

Donna then proposed a lesbian gangbang site, which also did not pass, and then started experimenting with the tactics that would go on to become Public Disgrace. She started while still filming Wired Pussy, doing a series of shoots in New York where she would wire up the performer and shock her under her clothes in public places. These were popular, so Donna did a Wired Pussy shoot where she invited members of the public. Eventually she got the go-ahead to make Public Disgrace a recurring series.

+ + +

I had insisted to myself that I wanted a long-term, committed relationship, of the kind celebrated by the CDC and most happy endings (of the narrative sort). I had decided that any other kind of sexual relationship was a “waste of time.” Having committed myself to a limited worldview I saw not as limited but rather as dignified and adult, I was able to distance myself from the very question I had gone west to investigate—one that was turning into a major question of my adult life: if love could not be relied upon to provide an idyllic terminus to one’s sexual history, and naive performative attempts at a noncommittal sex life resulted only in health scares and hurt feelings, how best to still carry out a sexual existence?

In San Francisco, the right to be a lawfully wedded couple was not taken for granted, but this question was still pursued with a cheerful, pragmatic determination. It came accompanied by Google spreadsheets, jargon, discussion groups, community centers, dietary changes, and hallucinogens. San Francisco’s sexual vanguard might overuse words like “consciousness” and “mindfulness,” but the success of their politicization of sex had repercussions that reached across the country. The mind-set could sometimes seem grim, or at least all that talking kind of dampened the feeling of spontaneity. But they meant it: “Polyamory is a decolonizing force,” one person explained to me. “If you want to transform society, it includes our intimate relations.”

I met with everyone I could. I met a group of Google employees in their early twenties, beneficiaries of the country’s most elite educational institutions, now applying their sharp minds to the investigation of multiple concurrent relationships. They all did yoga, were extremely attractive, and accompanied their sexual experimentation with controlled consumption of psilocybin mushrooms and MDMA. They spoke of primary and secondary relationships, and described a world in which jealousy and possessiveness were the sins to overcome. I attended the cult-like meetings of a group of people who have devoted themselves to the female orgasm. After a “game” at one meeting, where I stood directly in front of a male stranger who looked in my eyes and repeatedly demanded answers to the question “WHAT DO YOU DESIRE?” for several minutes, I went home, drank almost a full bottle of wine, and wept.

I took the train across the Bay to Oakland for a quiet dinner with several anarchists, to talk about anarchist ideas of sexuality. They all wore black and spoke of their decisions with a seriousness that my friends in New York might have had derided. The anarchists cooked kale and dressed their pasta with cashew pesto from a jar. Oakland’s soft summer warmth came as a welcome relief from San Francisco’s miserable microclimates. We dined with the windows open and the evening sun flooding into an apartment lined with books.

In another part of Oakland I met with a radical queer activist who had a platonic partner, a sexual partner, and a rotating cast of people with whom she “played.” (The really tough part, she admitted, was the scheduling.) I asked if her platonic partner was not just her roommate, or a friend, but she explained that it involved a deeper commitment: going to holidays at each other’s family homes, caring for each other when sick—everything expected of a husband or wife except for the sex. It wasn’t any easier than marriage, either: they were in couples’ therapy.

In the past twenty years, in San Francisco especially, the celebration of choice over systems has coincided with the advent of new technology and an influx of money and entrepreneurs. One result has been the healthy, humane workplaces presented by Google, Facebook, Twitter, and the other Bay Area companies and their acceptance of individual expression in the corporate workplace and of families in all their forms. These changes made for a better working experience, but they also made it easier to complacently watch the flourishing of unfamiliar digital monopolies, to partake in the consumer delights produced by unprecedented inequality with a mistaken sense of political agency, and to pay to watch a woman get gangbanged on the internet with a clean conscience, because the producers used the rhetoric of the fair and just. The ghosts of the formerly ostracized, including the untimely dead, haunted the city. The general consensus was that we honored the dead and the formerly oppressed by enacting the present utopia.

The wealth and the corporate culture that produced it defied the old models of good and bad. Google’s motto, “Don’t be evil,” had been adopted across a range of industries. Evil, unfortunately, remained loosely defined: we would know it when we saw it. But all we saw on our computers were our photographs, our friends, our broken hearts, our writing, our search terms, our sexual fetishes.

The friendly blandness of Google’s interface bestowed blessing on the words that passed through its sieve. On Google, all words were created equal, as all ways of choosing to live one’s life were equal. Google blurred the distinction between normal and abnormal. The answers its algorithms harvested assured each person of the presence of the like-minded: no one need be alone with her aberrant desires, and no desires were aberrant.

Googling “tiny blonde tied up and ass fucked in public” will lead you to a video I saw recorded in San Francisco one April evening. In life, the sex I saw there did not upset me, but when I arrive at the video via Google I want to turn it off. The whole motivation of our new sexual paradigm might be to ensure that nobody will be alienated, but porn is a medium where the expression of one person’s happy sex life can easily shade into another person’s estrangement.

I watched how my friends became anxious when the subject of porn came up. Some people enjoyed watching it as part of a daily routine. Some felt enslaved by their desire for it. Others saw their real-world sexual experiences reduced to a corny mimicry of porn, and wished they could somehow return to a time when porn was less ubiquitous, or was just soft-focus tan people having relatively unadventurous sex by a swimming pool. Since more men watch porn than women, the occasional imbalance of knowledge caused distress all around and was perceived at times as an imbalance of power. Porn made people jealous, it hurt feelings, it made them worry about whether their partners were attracted to them, or to the kind of people they watched in porn, who might have a different color hair, skin color, or bra size. Because porn loves the taboo, it was also sometimes racist and misogynist.

It’s tempting to think that life before internet porn was less complicated. There are sexual acts in porn that it would not occur to many people to attempt. We have more expectations now about what kind of sex to have, and how many people should be involved, and what to say, and what our bodies should look like, than we might have at a time when less imagery of sex was available to us. But if the panoply of opportunity depicted in porn seems exaggerated, the possibilities are no less vast outside the internet. The only sexual expectation left to conform to is that love will guide us toward the life we want to live.

What if love fails us? Sexual freedom has now extended to people who never wanted to shake off the old institutions, except to the extent of showing solidarity with friends who did. I have not sought so much choice for myself, and when I found myself with no possibilities except total sexual freedom, I was unhappy. I understood that the San Franciscans’ focus on intention—the pornographers were there by choice—marked the difference between my nihilism and their utopianism. When your life does not conform to an idea, and this failure makes you feel bad, throwing away the idea can make you feel better.

+ + +

The panda gangbang took place deep in the basement of the Kink armory, where rivulets of the long-suffocated Mission Creek still trace a path between moisture-eaten columns, and the air hangs heavy with a stony dampness. On the day of the shoot, a glow of warm light punctured the center of a cavernously empty space. Bathed in this warm glow, a young woman named Ashli lay sleeping, impervious to the styg-ian immensity of her surroundings. Her sleek black hair was draped over her shoulder; a small silken bow of the palest pink pinned it away from her face into a girlish side part. The hem of her pink dotted-swiss dress had been carefully arranged to reveal a glimpse of her upper thigh through the gauze. On her feet she wore six-inch patent leather high heels embellished with lace. She slumbered on a bed of green leaves in a simulated bamboo forest beneath wraiths of mist produced by a Rosco Hazemaker puffing gently away beyond the circle of light, the sound of which seemed not to disturb her.

The panda bears approached her from behind. They waved their horrible paws and sniffed inquisitively. One stood over her nibbling at a frond of bamboo. Another gently stroked her hair.

“Now poke her or kick her,” ordered Donna from the darkness. The pandas fell upon her. The sound of ripping gauze and a snapped bra strap broke the quiet. They fondled and slapped at her now-exposed breasts. She awoke and screamed in fear. “But I love pandas, I love pandas!” she cried out.

The panda shoot was a taxing one. Donna hovered around the bears, using metal clamps to keep the furry folds of their costumes from hiding the action. They took turns with Ashli without conferring much. Finally the pandas retired to their bamboo bowers and the shoot was over.

This article appears in Issue 16: Double Bind, available now. Subscribe with the code DESIRE to receive 10 percent off a four-issue subscription.

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Egypt Notebook

2013-05-03T16:00:00Z

by Ken Kalfus

Image: The American University in Cairo.

In Spring 2011, Ken Kalfus shared his travel notes with us for Issue 11, "Dual Power." He had been in Egypt the previous year researching a novel; that novel, Equilateral, is out now. We're glad to share his notes again.

Cairo

Family-run hotel on the top floor of an eight-story commercial building, with a balky elevator. Terrace looking west, past a dun sliver of Nile, into the sunset haze. Venus is the evening star, burns hard through the smog; I impress one of the sons by identifying it in Arabic, Zuhra, and then running through the names of the other planets, which I’ve learned for my novel. This about exhausts my Arabic.

Overwhelming impression of Cairo is not its antiquity, its Easternness, or the heat. It’s the traffic: chaotic, brutal, oppressive, worse than Moscow or Mexico City. Sidewalks narrow, broken-up, and obstructed by parked vehicles. Very few stoplights, almost no crosswalks, no pedestrian right of way, the cars just plow ahead. To cross the street I position myself on the other side of an Egyptian, preferably a woman, preferably a woman who looks like somebody’s mother, and I cross when she does, hoping she’ll block for me. Pedestrian rights are a key indicator of a society’s respect for the individual, also the power relations between the haves and carless have-nots. In my walks I find a single pedestrian crossing signal; when it turns green, the little man-figure runs for his life. At Tahrir Square, the pink sandstone of the Cairo Museum. Not sure I want to spend a whole afternoon inside, it’s not relevant to my book; the deciding factor is that it’s not worth trying to cross the road to get there.

An afternoon in the Islamic Quarter, writing in a friendly outdoor restaurant in the plaza by the mosque where the head of the Prophet’s grandson, Hussein, is said to be buried. Vendors in the plaza, kids scampering, holiday mood. Al-Hussein lies directly across from the 10th-century Al-Azhar Mosque. A lovely, restorative setting, if not for the fast-moving highway that slices between them.

Watch out for the cars; keep hydrating. Everyone seems to be carrying a plastic water bottle. No signs of recycling, millions of bottles pile up every day. About 20 cents for 250 ml, 50 cents for the liter. I read in the paper that Egypt’s population will outpace its water supply by 2018; also that the four countries in the Nile's headlands have united to renegotiate Egypt’s draw downward.

Sixteen million people in Cairo; I'm told the daytime population is actually more like twenty-two million, struggling to keep their footing on the congested, uneven pavement. A vision of our unsustainable future: too many people, not enough jobs; too many cars, not enough living space; too much refuse, not enough clean water.

+ + +

The Yacoubian Building, a 2002 novel by Alaa Al Aswany, weighs heavily on my time in Cairo, informs everything I see here, an unsentimental picture of an exigent, corrupted people. I pass the actual apartment house downtown, less grand than I imagined, occupied in the novel by several strata of Cairo life: a wealthy wheeler-dealer, a rising politician, a closeted gay newspaper editor, the poor who occupy a shantytown of windowless “iron rooms” on the roof, each of the rooms two by two meters square. The tragic beat of events turns monotonous, but the book is politically provocative, a devastating portrait of the tyrant “Big Man,” who must be Mubarak. An Egyptian film was made from the book; I wonder how they toned it down.

+ + +

The “baladi” bar on Tahrir Square, with a US consular officer in her late twenties, an Arabist who has lived in Cairo before. Energetic, enthusiastic, pretty, a friend of a friend, she speaks Arabic well. The bar is decrepit, the paneling dark and stained, its clients mostly older men who look like they're having more than one. Christian-owned, if it serves alcohol, but some of the drinkers wear galabeyas.

We eat at Caffe Riche, old Cairo restaurant, black (Nubian?) waiters in long blue robes. Nasser and the Free Officers met here to plan the coup. Pictures of old Cairo and old Cairenes on the wall. On my second beer and worried about keeping my companion entertained, I break my rule and tell her the plot of my novel. She’s fascinated! This is encouraging.

Then Café Bustan for coffee, located directly behind the restaurant. Feeling adventurous and playful, and knowing that I wouldn’t do it on my own, I try an apple-spiced water pipe. As if I haven’t been inhaling enough combustion products. The sheesha is pleasant enough, but after that I develop a cough and cold that last for a week.

+ + +

Out in the desert suburbs, New Cairo, new campus of the American University in Cairo. Bright, airy, sensitive-to-the-environment, Arab-inflected design. The AUC has no official American status; it is an independent university.

I give a brief talk, spend almost the entire day with women, they dominate the literature program. Bright, engaged, not too current on American literature. I bring them news of Freedom, mention a few quarterlies, describe my own books. I’m taken around by two undergrads, Mushari and H., a young Palestinian whose family was kicked out of Jerusalem in ’48. The students are in Western student dress, jeans, T-shirts, and sneakers. Jared’s Bagels in the campus plaza, but I don’t get to try one.

Asked about my “background,” I strenuously avoid mentioning that I’m Jewish, not wanting to get involved in a tedious conversation about Israel. This of course means I lose half my shtick, including the word “shtick.”

But at one point we do start talking politics, what’s going to happen after Mubarak dies. The plan for succession is not clear at all; everyone shakes their head in wonder — Will it be Gamal? a junta? Muslim Brotherhood? — the very near future is a mystery. H. steps away from the conversation. She later explains she has to stay out of politics. As a Pal she has no rights in Egypt, she can be deported anytime.

+ + +

Near the hotel, a good-looking young man in a pressed shirt and a sports jacket stops me to say that the American people are a great people, it’s the government that’s been corrupted by the “Israelians.” I tell him it’s slightly more complicated than that, and he agrees that perhaps that's so. He says he’s Palestinian. His home in Gaza was destroyed, he lost his wife and four children. Now he’s come to Egypt, and is in danger of being deported before his visa gets straightened out. He needs $9 to pay for his hostel tonight. I know the story’s true, even if it may not have happened to him. He’s anxious when I signal we should duck into a doorway, but I don’t like taking my wallet out on the street.

+ + +

As usual I gravitate toward market streets, the gleaming heaps of fresh vegetables, barrels of olives, buckets of spices. Pots and pans for sale, all of them seemingly of identical manufacture, this may be the pots neighborhood. Pushcarts, youths carrying enormous bundles, youths delivering trays of tea. I’m oddly uncharmed. I used to congratulate myself for being somewhere exotic, now I just recognize my presence as a function of my relative affluence or, more specifically, in this case, the accumulation of frequent flyer miles.

More women than not wear some kind of head covering on the streets, a hijab, abaya, or full-length burka, with just a slit showing for the eyes. If Egypt is becoming more deeply Islamic, I’m not sure the evidence is in the burkas. Some are tight and satiny; half-burkas just make it down to the waist; I see burka-clad women on the backs of motorcycles, their arms around men.

It may be a prejudice, a misreading of a foreign country’s signs and symbols, to assume that every burka represents another religiously devoted woman; the head coverings can be fashion without the statement. Is that possible? Perhaps an Egyptian guy comes to the US, sees tight, short skirts, cleavage, high heels, and wonders, “Wait a minute. Are all these women whores?”

+ + +

Up the Nile

Train to Assiut, south, in Upper Egypt. Men in galabeyas out in the fields, even scarecrows in galabeyas. A youth repeatedly strikes a donkey with a stick and an even left-handed batter's stroke, as if he’s trying to knock it out of the park. Kids playing in irrigation ditches, textbook definition of how to get bilharzia. Built-up towns with several-storied buildings on narrow, heavily trafficked streets. Increasingly less Latin transliteration, some of the station signs entirely in Arabic. The green productive valley, the desert plateau rising beyond the river in the east.

I finish The Yacoubian Building, resume Flaubert in Egypt. Brio, adventure, sensuality. His account of the pyramids at Giza is rhapsodic: “the whole valley of the Nile, bathed in mist, seemed to be a still white sea . . .” He climbs Cheops and from its apex watches the sunrise. Afterward, he finds a business card left there as a joke by his companion, Maxime du Camp: “Humbert, Frotteur.” (I wonder if Nabokov . . .) And like other European travelers, he plunges into the Oriental fleshpots. “But the best was the second copulation with Kuchuk. Effect of her necklace between my teeth. Her cunt felt like rolls of velvet as she made me come.”

+ + +

Assiut: taxi driver from the station inexplicably nervous, won’t let me off in front of the hotel. When I check in, the front desk looks at my passport and announces that I’m not allowed to leave the hotel without a police escort. All I want is dinner, but four cops show up, squeezed in a little police clown car. The car follows as I walk down the block and look for a restaurant. When I turn off the street they get mad and start hitting the horn.

I go back to the hotel; its restaurant turns out to serve beer. I’m the only patron and the manager comes to sit with me. He right away asks if I’m a Jew.

I say, “No, not at all! I’m a . . . an Episcopalian!” He looks at me gravely, and is ready to inquire about the tenets of my Episcopalianism, about which I know nothing, so I rush to add: “But I’m not observant!”

He, on the hand, is a Copt and observant and deadly serious; he tells me in low, anxious tones about the violence the Islamists have directed against Christians in Upper Egypt; the Muslim Brotherhood has launched a campaign of terror. He takes out pictures of a local church that was destroyed by arson; the miracle is that a sculpted tableau inside the church survived the flames intact, as I can see, bleached a pearly white. These grievances, these atrocities, and these signs of heavenly attention — Yugoslavia.

The police don’t care about me. What with rising political unrest and religious strife, they just want me to leave before I get in trouble or make any. In the morning two police cars arrive, one to lead my taxi to the bus station, the other to follow it, sirens shrieking. An officer sits with me to make sure I get on the bus. I buy him a 7-Up.

+ + +

Through the Western Desert

To Kharga: completely dead, almost no scrub. Rolling waves of sand that stretch to the horizon. Beige dirt, perhaps some loose sand. “OiLibya” gas station. They let a fellah on at the gas station, there’s some discussion with the conductor, and they kick him off, two hundred meters into the desert. He’ll have to walk back. Struggling trees planted on the side of the road. The many varieties of desert Thayer, a character in my novel, will have to dig through. A sandy plain on which rests many large black round rocks and boulders. They can be polished and sold in Europe as souvenirs.

Excited sense of arrival as I enter the desert, this is what I’ve come to see. My novel’s set in the lower lefthand quadrant of the country, a vastness obscured on most Egypt maps by the “Key to Symbols.” No real research to do here, but I want to sniff the air and pick up a handful of sand.

+ + +

To Dakhla: a “service-taxi” van travels to the next oasis, no schedule, it leaves when it has enough passengers. The passengers ask where I’m from, and when I tell them, they shout, “America Number One!” In the same spirit I respond, “Egypt Number One!” and they laugh at me. Moving, passionate, religious singing in the tape deck. We pass what appear to be several prisons, including an institution whose sign reads, in English, “The International Children’s Work Camp.” One lane each way to Dakhla, vehicles drive in the middle of the roadway when there’s no oncoming traffic, and sometimes when there is. At police checkpoints, the driver tells them I’m American. They ask where I’m going, but don’t ask for my passport. In the town of Moot, the Moot Information Office.

+ + +

Sandstorms, and I’m stuck in a cute, villa-like hotel above the medieval village of Al Qasr for a few days — they say it’s too dangerous to travel between the oases. I’m the only guest, and the staff is happy to have my company (which may be why they say it’s too dangerous to travel). I work on my novel in a very warm room. When I open the window, sand pours in.

+ + +

The desert’s a fertile place for internet scams:

Hossam works in the hotel; tall, suave, genuinely interested in why I've come. One morning he shyly shows me his correspondence with “The United State of America Lottery,” located on E. Post Road in White Plains, but headquartered in Nigeria. They told him he won $500,000.00, and after he inquired about it, they became increasingly importunate. Now they’re texting him demands for “good faith” money. They warn they’ve already informed the “Egyptian High Commissioner" of his winnings.

Up the road, in Bahariya, Essam has no prospects at all, whiles away his days in a dim, grimy internet café stocked with plodding PCs that appear to date from the Middle Kingdom. “Chatting” with “girls.” He’s also following up a promise for a job as a waiter in London, at the Ambassadors Hotel. He has to pay only for the immigration application. I look into it for him, and it too tracks back to Nigeria.

Both guys are smart and speak English, but it’s not their first language and they can’t identify the solecisms, in language and in assumptions about the way the world works, that would be ludicrous to a First World native speaker. Most of the world’s English speakers aren’t native; many are strivers marooned in places with few outlets for their ambitions. The internet and the English language are their only connections to the outside world. Hossam and Essam both are grievously disappointed when I tell them they’ve been scammed: another door closes. They feel foolish, possibly even humiliated by their gullibility, even more humiliated by their hopelessness.

+ + +

Dakhla to Farafra to Bahariya: perfect, rolling sand dunes, then flat desert; then hillocky dunes; then puddles of dried salt. Desert every shade of white. Weird wind-carved rocks, almost like totemic heads. Plateaus in the distance, beach grasses on the side of the road. A dune field, each dune topped black. Dirt the color of burnt flan.

Expedition: Nast, local Bedouin guide with a Toyota Land Cruiser. I ride with him about two hundred kilometers up the highway, Andre and Claudine, French couple I met in Farafra, following us. At a highway cafeteria we load our bags into the truck, head off the road into the desert. That moment when we roll off the edge of the asphalt: first time I’ve understood the thrill behind the idea of “off-road.” The truck gets a workout, up and down dunes, the rolling hills of the ancient Sahara sea bottom. Nast knows where he’s going, no map or GPS. No litter in the desert, no sign of human beings at all from one horizon to the next, except for the tire tracks, which are plentiful and must go on indefinitely. At Wadi Hitan, an open air museum that displays fossils (or their models?) of extinct whales and dolphins, from the Late Eocene. Two-hour hike among the exhibits. Excellent museum, considering there’s no road to get to it. More driving. Wadi, overlooking a blue lake. Andre sends Inga and Sky a picture of me through his Blackberry, which, notwithstanding the desolation, gets two bars. Around six, after more than one  hundred kilometers, near Wadi Ruyan, an untouched area of soft pure clean sand, we make camp by a towering square rock that rests in a gentle depression scooped out by the wind. Nast puts up a lean-to against the truck, lays down rugs.

He starts a fire from dry wood that he’s brought, barbecues chicken, makes a vegetable sauce from scratch. We stand around, try to help. A quick-moving sunset, then Venus. It’s about ten-thirty by the time we turn in, the four of us side by side on the rugs. The sky, which had some high-altitude haze during the day, is now clear. Mars (Merrikh) and Saturn (Zuhal) are up. Around three-thirty, the moon’s long set, and the Milky Way marches across the sky undisturbed. Jupiter (Mushtarie) rises. The seeing’s good, not excellent. We’re hardly above sea level, the atmosphere dense despite the aridity.

No birdsong in the morning, no sounds of waking life. Haven’t seen a bird since we left the road. At dawn, while my companions sleep, I walk a couple of miles into the emptiness, until not even the truck is visible. A certain melancholia has been chasing me since Cairo; a great heaviness on my mind. I feel better after a good cry.

+ + +

Bibliotheca Alexandrina

"Alexandria, the capital of Memory,” writes Durrell in Justine. It’s fair to say that capital was taken long ago, the European-centered memory shattered into dream fragments. A population of four million, maybe five; the city has been fully Egyptianized (as it should be), the Mediterranean-style buildings, decayed in Durrell’s time, now anonymous in their ruin; but they’ve hardly been replaced. I jump onto a tram, accidentally into the women’s car. I get yelled at, I profusely apologize, they continue yelling at me, I flee.

Virtually the only survivor of Durrell’s capital is the Greek Club, at the end of the Corniche, a long walk around the bay. Sitting on the terrace above the marina, listening to Greek music, I have a couple of beers while the sun sets. Durrell: “the angle of the sunlight turns slowly into the vitreous lilac of the evening sky.” The arc of the bay shows a low-built city, tired, crumbling, neglected — except for the stirring sight of the new tear-shaped Library of Alexandria, gray concrete and steel, prominent from every point on the Corniche. The one new thing.

At the Bibliotheca Alexandrina: in the plaza outside, a meeting place, vendors, buskers, tourists, a real Pompidou vibe. Inside, a vast stepped hall, reminiscent of the Galactic Senate. Natural light coming in through slitted windows, perfect for reading. Jammed with college-aged students, most of them women, most of them in head-scarves, many of them on their cell phones. I look over one woman’s shoulder; her book is about agricultural production. I have some difficulty finding a place where I can plug in, but I work there for the afternoon.

I walk back, buy some corn on the cob, and pass through a worn park that looks out on the harbor. Statue of Mohammed Ali, the first Khedive, who started the royal Egyptian line. Beneath him, a couple on a bench. He’s a young guy, in jeans and a tight T-shirt; I can’t tell the woman’s age: she’s sheathed in a top-to-toe burka. They have eyes only for each other, they hold hands, they murmur, they cuddle. They don’t see me when I smile at them. Nice work if you can get it!

+ + +

The Night

Return to Cairo. Dinner in Zamalek with a charming Egyptian couple, she’s a grad student, he’s worked for the UN, written novels, writes about politics — though, he says, usually on foreign affairs. Domestic politics can be dangerous, he doesn’t know anything about domestic politics anyway, but then he lays out all the possible Mubarak succession scenarios, in informed detail. He says the US can’t do anything now; the crucial moment will come when Mubarak croaks. Then Obama’s got to lean on the generals.

They say it’s an easy walk back: right over the bridge, then a straight shot to Tahrir Square, a block from my hotel. Passage over the Nile: lights of the relatively compact downtown ahead, the river black below. But once I reach the other side, there’s a highway that I have to run across, and several other fast-moving roads, and then I have to climb through a hole in a cyclone fence, along with dozens of other people. This may be their regular commute. They see I’m a foreigner, they don’t mind blocking the traffic for me or helping me over another fence, a low one. Then a long stretch of shops operating out of makeshift constructions of corrugated metal, most of them open despite the hour, a swarm of raucous, good-natured, bantering shoppers. I pass them unseen. It no longer feels like a straight shot. I’m rushing now, even though I’m lost, the streets get darker and start blurring together. More late-night shops, maybe the same ones.

Then suddenly I enter a blaze of light, sound, and movement. It’s the traffic circle at Tahrir Square. I didn't expect it. Coming from an unfamiliar direction, I don’t recognize it at all.

Purchase print issue »

Chiquita Banana Jingle

2013-05-01T16:00:00Z

by Evan Kindley

Image: Patrick Martinez, "Keep It Real."

Timothy D. Taylor. The Sounds of Capitalism: Advertising, Music, and the Conquest of Culture. University of Chicago Press, July 2012.
Jonathan Sterne. MP3: The Meaning of a Format. Duke University Press, July 2012.
Chris Ruen. Freeloading: How Our Insatiable Hunger for Free Content Starves Creativity. O/R Books, December 2012.

In 2006, the popular indie rock band of Montreal allowed the restaurant chain Outback Steakhouse to use a version of their song “Wraith Pinned to the Mist (and Other Games)” in a thirty-second television commercial. While such a business decision was hardly unprecedented, the brazenness of the usage — the original chorus lyrics “Let’s pretend we don’t exist / Let’s pretend we’re in Antarctica” were replaced with a more on-message variant: “Let’s go Outback tonight / Life will still be there tomorrow” — led to a number of denunciations, particularly on the internet. (The exact details of the band’s deal with Outback are unclear, but of Montreal front man Kevin Barnes has claimed that he was unaware the lyrics would be changed.) It probably didn’t help that the advertised product involved meat and had absolutely zero existing cultural cachet, or that the remake “Australianized” of Montreal’s arrangement by making prominent use of didgeridoo.

In February 2007, attendees of an of Montreal show at Emo’s in Austin, Texas held up a homemade Outback banner and chanted “SELL OUT” at the band. (According to one online report, Barnes had security throw the troublemakers out of the club; others claim he merely lectured them from the stage.) In November of the same year, of Montreal participated in another commercial, this time for T-Mobile, providing the occasion for a manifesto written by Barnes for the website Stereogum, with the Baudrillardian title “Selling Out Isn’t Possible.” “The pseudo-nihilistic punk rockers of the ’70s created an impossible code . . . which no one can actually live by,” Barnes wrote. “The idea that anyone who attempts to do anything commercial is a sell out is completely out of touch with reality. . . . I think it is important to face reality.” Facing reality, for Barnes, meant accepting that, “[a]s sad as it may seem, one of the few ways most indie bands can make any money whatsoever is by selling a song to a commercial. Very very few bands make enough money from album sales or tour revenue to enable themselves to quit their day job.”

Next time you see a commercial with one of your favorite bands' songs in it, just tell yourself, “cool, a band I really like made some money and now I can probably look forward to a few more records from them.” It’s as simple as that.

In 2007, this line of reasoning still came off as slightly cagey and defensive, but it has rapidly become the party line for musicians, fans, and advertising executives alike, all of them looking for somewhere to stand in the rapidly shifting post-Internet economic landscape of the 21st-century music industry. Barnes’s screed can be read as a founding document of a new pop era, in which it’s the musicians who get righteously angry at the fans on the subject of commercialism. The old complaint, in which artists are scorned for abandoning the communities that nurtured them and ascending into the corporate empyrean, has been replaced by a new one, in which artists rage at those same communities for not lifting them up high enough to keep body and soul together.

+ + +

It’s in this confused, poisonous atmosphere that the stigma against the advertising industry has begun to break down. The taboo itself isn’t ancient (though it’s certainly older than “the pseudo-nihilistic punk rockers of the ’70s” that Barnes scapegoats); as the musicologist Timothy D. Taylor shows in The Sounds of Capitalism, the links between American popular music and advertising are longstanding. While he briefly covers the “prehistory” of the phenomenon in the cries of 13th-century street hawkers recorded in the Montpellier Codex, Taylor’s real starting place is radio, which, he argues, is where the marriage between music and advertising was first truly consummated. Radio stations needed content to fill time and keep people listening (this is where the musicians came in) and capital to keep themselves afloat (enter the advertisers). For a while radio producers were reluctant to merge art and commerce too brazenly: a “good-will strategy” prevailed, in which companies like Lucky Strike, the Dixie Cup Company, and Fleischmann’s Yeast would “present” popular musicians. (The link between musical content and product was often pretty strained; the Clicquot Club Eskimos, a banjo orchestra subsidized by a soft-drink manufacturer, were described as “play[ing] ‘sparkling’ music because their ginger ale sparkles.”) This soon evolved, in part due to pressure to keep consumption up during the Depression, into a “hard-sell strategy,” in which musicians and composers shilled much more directly for various products. Taylor places “the heyday of the jingle” in the late 1940s, the period that gave us classics like the Chiquita Banana jingle, which debuted in late 1944 and by 1945 was being played an estimated 376 times a day.

In many ways, the increased involvement of rock musicians in the commercial industry follows an old pattern: a similar thing happened in the 1950s, when formerly contemptuous Broadway composers moved into advertising en masse when rock and roll began to cut into their profits. (Frank Loesser, of Guys and Dolls fame, even started his own jingle publishing company in 1957, producing songs for Sunkist, Sanka, Newport, and others.) Taylor also points out that the shift to digital music production in the 1980s incentivized ad agencies to hire cheap, nonunionized young rock musicians and producers in lieu of high-priced industry professionals.

Still, the concept of “selling out” had plenty of cultural currency well into the early 2000s, and not only in the nascent “indie” world. (As Taylor reports, high-profile licensing deals like Nike’s infamous use of the Beatles’ “Revolution” in 1987 stirred up plenty of righteous anger among baby boomers.) If anything, this critical discourse was overdeveloped in the post-Sixties counterculture, whose members had a tendency to act as if the real problem with capitalism was that it worked too well (insidiously controlling hapless consumers, and corrupting the purity of producers) rather than not working well enough (failing to provide an equal distribution of wealth and other goods). The preoccupation with “selling out,” in other words, played into the larger dynamic of what Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello have described as the “artistic critique” of capitalism, which focuses on the evils of commodification and inauthenticity at the expense of those of inequality and atomization.

Today, though, Taylor argues, the concept of “sell-out” may be losing its validity — and, oddly, it is the ascension to power of the same generations that refined the “artistic critique,” the boomers and Generation X, that is leading to its demise. “[B]y the 1950s, advertising music had begun to become closely intertwined with the production of popular music generally,” he writes:

The rise of the baby boomers and postboomers to power in the advertising industry and the increased flexibility of workers in the realm of commercial music has meant that there is no popular music that is not, to varying degrees, commercial music, whether or not listeners hear it as such. The long-standing distinction between art and commerce much debated by advertising industry workers and those who study them has become moot: the sounds of capitalism are everywhere.

The Sounds of Capitalism includes some especially vexing recent examples of the integration of the music and advertising industries: McDonald’s 2005 deal with marketing company Maven Strategies to seed references to Big Macs into rap lyrics, for instance, or the machinations behind the singer Chris Brown’s song “Forever,” whose hook “Double your pleasure, double your fun” was bought and paid for by Wrigley, though the corporation strategically waited to unveil their campaign until the song had been released and become a hit in its own right. On the whole, though, Taylor’s claim that “in the new millennium . . . there is no counterculture anymore; there is only culture, and it is made by commercial interests” seems overstated. Cultural resistance to the influence of advertising on popular music may be at a forty-year low, but there is still plenty of music that remains practically if not ideologically detached from “commercial interests.” Mashing up the arguments of The Conquest of Cool and Distinction, with the occasional uncleared Adorno sample thrown in, Taylor strains to impart a sense of implacable historical logic to what is, in fact, a very chaotic state of affairs.

Still, Taylor is certainly right to observe that the relationship between the advertising and music industries matters today in a new way. Let’s leave aside the actual influence corporate advertising has on today’s musicians or music culture; its status in the arguments we have about music has certainly changed. In recent years the pendulum of shame has begun to swing back the other way: where once fans routinely accused greedy musicians of selling out (or each other of enjoying “sell-out” music), now musicians counter-accuse consumers of abandoning the market economy, forcing them into the arms of corporate benefactors. In such a scenario, Taylor points out, cultural intermediaries like “advertising agency creative workers appear to be heroes of a sort.” They have the melancholy Protestant commitment to “creativity” that Max Weber thought 19th-century Americans had toward production per se: “Theirs is a way of attempting to survive the unprecedented voracity of capitalism and the iron cage of rationalization that accompanies it, even as they serve capitalism.” The hip young sophisticates who work at advertising today have not given up the basic countercultural faith that commerce and art are incompatible, but they have tempered it with the realist proviso that artists, like everybody else, need to get paid somehow. In Taylor’s words, they “still have no tolerance for what they view as commercial music . . . . At the same time, however, they have no compunction about using this music for commercial purposes.” Advertising, then, is not an illicit way for musicians to enrich themselves but one of the few viable ways for them to secure support: not a ladder on the rung to transcendence but the only port in a storm.

+ + +

That storm, of course, is the internet, which most accounts hold responsible for the music industry’s decline. Though Taylor’s book makes surprisingly little reference to file sharing or other technological developments of the past few decades, other writers have not been shy about opening fire on the elephant in the room. Chris Ruen’s recital of the litany, at the opening of his new book FreeLoading: How Our Insatiable Hunger for Free Content Starves Creativity, is familiarly bleak:

After only ten years, US music industry revenues shriveled from over $14 billion a year to less than $7 billion. From 2000 to 2009, total US album sales (physical and digital) plummeted by fifty-two percent, from 785 million to 374 million units . . . Per capita, Americans in 2009 spent just one third of the amount of money they devoted to recorded music in 2000, from an all-time high of $71 per consumer to a modern-era low of $26 . . . The total number of people employed as professional musicians in the United States fell by seventeen percent from 1999 to 2009 as piracy migrated from the margins and into the mainstream.

As Ruen’s reference to “piracy” suggests, blame for the collapse of the music industry is often placed on peer-to-peer networking and file sharing. This is a considerable oversimplification; Taylor points out, for instance, that many of artists’ current financial woes can be traced back to the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which deregulated the radio industry, paving the way for the rise of the Clear Channel empire and a consolidation of playlists that disproportionately affected mid-level artists on independent labels (another force behind the easement of the advertising taboo).

Nonetheless, the culture of peer-to-peer file sharing and piracy makes an irresistible polemical target, not only because of its obvious effect on profits but also because of the superstructure of philosophical discourse that has grown up around it over the past decade. Ruen identifies three primary ideologies to rail against, a rogues’ gallery of high-toned intellectual apologists for “FreeLoading.” First, there is the anti-copyright Free Culture movement, led and exemplified by Lawrence Lessig, who advocates for a “read-write” as opposed to a “read-only” culture and the promotion of increased collective creativity through loosened intellectual property laws. Then there are the “digital determinists,” represented by BoingBoing’s Cory Doctorow, who hold that “you can’t fight technology”: “Armed with techno-utopian assumptions, a file sharer had a new way to understand their choice to not pay for their digital content: they were only doing what the computers ‘wanted.’” Finally, there are new media boosters like Wired’s Chris Anderson and Mike Masnick of the blog Techdirt, who propose that musicians need to adapt to the realities of the new market by providing incentives for their fans to pay for otherwise free content (the best known example of this being the much-discussed crowd-funding site Kickstarter).

To Ruen, all three of these positions look like little more than justifications for the hedonistic selfishness of “a generation of spoiled, entitled children.” Unfortunately, Ruen offers little to counter these positions other than eye-rolling; the book is a bit of a hodgepodge held together by its moralistic, sanctimonious tone, which occasionally scales the heights of theoretical pretension (“At issue today is whether we see ourselves existing within the construct of philosopher Immanuel Kant”—oh, really?). Still, Ruen does make some sound and valuable points, particularly about the inadequacies of claims by people like Lessig and Anderson that our current climate is healthy for the production of culture. “The wisdom of copyright,” Ruen writes, “is to focus the incentives, like a laser, upon the creative work itself. If our shared interest is the creation of more or better art, then why take away the fundamental right that incentivizes it, while setting artists off on a wild goose chase to find the best marketing scheme rather than to write the best song?” He also asks some provocative questions about the cozy relationship between the music website Pitchfork, the FADER Magazine, and Cornerstone Promotion (a New York-based lifestyle marketing agency), and about the January 2012 protests of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) by high-traffic websites like Wikipedia, Reddit, Google, and Mozilla.

Though Ruen seems to align himself with the libertarian left, FreeLoading is a helplessly conservative book, standing athwart our collective browser history yelling Stop. Countering what he sees as an excessive prejudice against record labels stirred up by the Recording Industry Association of America’s mass lawsuits against P2P users beginning in September 2003, Ruen idealizes the stringently ethical business practices of indie rock labels like Dischord (who made a point of never charging more than $10 for a CD and splitting profits equally with artists; and were, even in the indie community, much more the exception than the rule). Ironically, the adversarial counter-public sphere of indie rock—which emerged, of course, out of the same punk moment that Barnes accused of setting impossible expectations for artists to live up to—appears, to Ruen, as the only portal back to a healthy market economy. Not only is punk not dead: it’s the only thing that can save capitalism.

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Where Taylor sees no daylight between contemporary music culture and the market, Ruen worries that what he calls “the Decade of Dysfunction” has permanently obliterated the relationship between the two. A useful corrective to both concerns is Jonathan Sterne’s MP3: The Meaning of a Format. For one thing, Sterne’s book underscores a point to which Taylor and Ruen only allude, which is that our current culture of “piracy” should not be understood as a real alternative or viable threat to capitalism—a notion that both its promoters and its detractors have cherished.

To begin with, Sterne shows that the MP3—that technological Trojan horse which has laid waste to the music industry—was the product of decades of corporate-funded research intended to increase profits. “Telephonic transmission drove research into hearing for much of the century,” Sterne writes; companies like AT&T were concerned to maximize their existing infrastructure, using the available bandwidth to carry as many calls as possible without going beyond the threshold of intelligibility. This led them to finance research in the fledgling field of “psychoacoustics” (part of a general trend toward corporate research and development in the early part of the 20th century, as Sterne notes). “The more AT&T knew about human hearing, the more income it could extract from its infrastructure,” Sterne writes. By 1924 it had quadrupled its system’s capacity, “with minimal modifications of infrastructure and no price increase.” The company’s basic research into human hearing led to innovations in the technology of “compression”: i.e., the simplification and reduction of an audio signal to its most essential elements. On the very first page of MP3: The Meaning of a Format, Sterne offers an admirably lucid description of the way MP3s work:

To make an MP3, a program called an encoder takes a .wav file (or some other audio format) and compares it to a mathematical model of the gaps in human hearing. Based on a number of factors—some chosen by the user, some set in the code—it discards the parts of the audio signal that are unlikely to be audible. It then reorganizes repetitive and redundant data in the recording, and produces a much smaller file—often as small as 12 percent of the original file size.

These smaller, simpler files are much easier to distribute via “end-to-end networks” like the internet, in which “the vast middle of the network does relatively little to its traffic . . . while devices at the ends of the network do the important work.” MPEG (the acronym stands for “Motion Picture Experts Group,” the name of the organization that originally set the standard for the format in the late 1980s and early ’90s) files were meant to be unobtrusive, unheralded players on the global field of multinational corporate synergy: “Like a person who slips into a crowd, the MPEG audio was designed to disappear into the global network of communication technologies.”

But they were not designed initially to be traded by consumers. Sterne points out that “at the time that MPEG came together, there was no world wide web, no internet as we know it today.” In a diagram of “Digital Audio Distribution Modes (Current and Proposed)” created by the National Association of Broadcasters in 1990, “there is no slot . . . for lateral exchange of recordings, nor even an inkling that it might be an issue, no discussion of mass customization, and little discussion of portable media beyond car radios.” The NAB had their eyes on digital broadcast and cable, not file sharing; the extreme ease with which MP3 files can be copied and played on a range of devices was the end result of a concern for “interoperability” across different industrial platforms.

Thus, Sterne argues, “the MP3’s rise to global preeminence was a product of contingency, accident, and opportunity”: it was not an inevitable logical step in the forward march of technological progress or late capitalism, but a fluke, an accidental collision of mutually conflicting corporate interests. It is important to remember, too, that while major record companies were wrong-footed by file sharing, corporations (and often the same ones that owned the record companies) did profit enormously from the rise of the MP3. Internet service providers and cable companies offering broadband internet access, for instance, did exceptionally well during Ruen’s “Decade of Dysfunction,” as did manufacturers of CD burners and blank recordable media. (A company like Sony, for instance, has interests in all four.) For Sterne, the lesson here is that “alternative, non-market economies within capitalism may not themselves be anticapitalist. It may appear that file-sharing and sampling challenge particular market economies, but that does not necessarily mean that they challenge the broader capitalist condition of music.” After all, he sensibly reminds us, “to threaten an industry’s incumbents is not to threaten the economy itself, despite incumbents’ protestations to the contrary and their critics’ glee at the prospect.”

This longer historical view certainly undercuts the insurrectionary rhetoric of anarchists like the operators of Sweden’s Pirate Bay, and even, to some extent, the “read-write” pieties of a digital communist like Lessig. But it also suggests that we who are living through this moment of confusion across industries should use it to our advantage, and the advantage of future generations—that we have “an opportunity to rethink the social organization of music,” as Sterne puts it. While it may seem to critics like Ruen that the social ties between musician and fan are being frayed, one could just as well argue that the current difficulty of seeing music in transactional terms is broadening our awareness of the social aspect of music. What remains to be done is a broadening of awareness of the technological platforms that make this socialization possible. It appears likely that the next phase of mass music listening—in some ways, and in some quarters, it’s already begun—will involve what Sterne calls the “utility model” (others have given it the groovier appellation of “celestial jukebox”). In this model, “music companies would become more like phone, electrical, cable, or satellite companies. The service, not the recording, becomes the commodity form.” Given the MP3’s roots in telephony and digital broadcasting, this scenario seems highly plausible.

But giving up the old commodity model means giving up, to some extent at least, the principle of mutual exchange, which, for better or worse, has provided our primary model for ethical relations per se, as David Graeber has recently emphasized. Clearly many artists do feel, today, that a social contract has been broken, and they have a tendency to blame the fans for this. A recent public example of this came in June 2012, when David Lowery, the singer for the bands Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker who now teaches at the University of Georgia, responded to a blog post by a 20-year-old NPR intern named Emily White. In her post White admitted that, while she had over 11,000 tracks on her iTunes, she had purchased only 15 CDs in her life. “My intention here is not to shame you or embarrass you,” Lowery writes in the preamble to his open letter to White, before going on to do essentially that for some 4,000 words, even implying that illegal file sharing was indirectly responsible for the suicides of the musicians Vic Chesnutt and Mark Linkous. “The existential questions that your generation gets to answer are these,” Lowery wrote, in a frequently quoted passage:

Why do we value the network and hardware that delivers music but not the music itself?

Why are we willing to pay for computers, iPods, smartphones, data plans, and high speed internet access but not the music itself?

Why do we gladly give our money to some of the largest richest corporations in the world but not the companies and individuals who create and sell music?

From one perspective, encounters like these are a welcome reminder of the fact that music, as anthropologists like the late Christopher Small have been insisting for decades, is always a communal undertaking, as dependent on the affective and economic investment of listeners as it ever has been on the exceptional abilities of the genius composer or virtuoso. And it’s never a bad thing for professionals, of any kind, to insist publicly that the work they do is valuable and that they deserve to be adequately compensated for it.

From another point of view, however, musicians attacking the listening public for its selfishness is neither a good look nor a viable strategy for changing people’s behavior. It’s as understandable that musicians would want to cling to the old forms of commodity capitalism as it is that eager, open-minded listeners would want to destroy it. But for people who care about how music is going to be made, heard, and paid for (or not) in the 21st century, the current debate over the ethics of exchange may have to give way, and soon, to the Realpolitik of standard-setting. The epochal MP3, after all, was neither an epiphenomenon of late capitalism nor a pure product of anarchist hacker culture: it was a compromise hammered out by representatives of industrial interests. Like most technological standards, this one had virtually no input from states: “because standards usually apply to international industries, governments have not been heavily involved in their regulation. . . . When companies or industries set standards, there is not even a possibility of public debate.” Sterne persuasively argues that “the MPEG story points to the need for better governance of audiovisual standards and formats, one guided by a notion of collective good.” If music is reconceived as a utility, after all, don’t we all have a legitimate right to it? Shouldn’t the state take an interest in its regulation?

The music industry as we knew it, with its shaky ad hoc compromises between art and commerce, is never coming back, but that’s no reason to resign ourselves to resentment or bad faith: we may yet look back on this time as the era of the emergence of a new politics of music. “The story of MPEG,” Sterne writes, “poses standards as an as-yet-unresolved issue of political representation in the development of new communications technologies.” The standards for the technologies that will shape music listening for the next fifty years are being set today; if we want them to represent us, we will have to find ways to make our presence and interests known to the people who write code and broker distribution deals as well as those who produce and consume music. (Who knows what form this might take? Occupy Spotify has a ring to it.) Lowery is certainly right to point out that Emily White’s generation—and not hers alone—has “value[d] the network and hardware that delivers music but not the music itself.” But perhaps the two are no longer extricable, if they ever were. And we have no reason not to hear ourselves in all of them.

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Cultural Revolution

2013-04-29T16:00:00Z

by The Editors

Image: Maya Lin, "Storm King Wavefield."

The cultural nature of politics, the political nature of culture: these have formed the main quandary debated by left intellectuals, mainly among themselves (and there lies much of the trouble), over the twenty some years since the oldest of us went off to colleges where Theory and Cultural Studies were all the impotent rage. For two decades, our thinking has turned on this culture/politics axis, both when we were spinning our wheels and when it seemed like we were getting somewhere. There are always fresh phenomena for the familiar problematic: only recently, for example, have American intellectuals, “cultural producers,” and college grads with humanities degrees adopted a basically sociological understanding of culture, including their own, or have TV show-runners displayed a notable quotient of South Asian faces. Still, all new left-wing cultural-political analyses share an old question: is this or that cultural object shoring up an unjust society, or undermining it? The question applies not just to novels, TV shows, new diets, and social media platforms, but also, more uncomfortably, to the essays and books that we left intellectuals write about these things.

The best general formulation of the problem may still be Herbert Marcuse’s essay “The Affirmative Character of Culture” (1937). For Marcuse, even when art or entertainment didn’t flatter power outright, culture as such tended to affirm, rather than negate, the existing social order: the very foretaste of a happier life offered by one kind of art, or the commiseration over present-day reality offered by another kind, helped people to endure the way things were. A dialectician, Marcuse did allow that culture could also, sometimes, negate, and seduce or incite you toward revolution — but his emphasis fell on culture as accommodation to the status quo. And this dominant pessimism about the capacity of culture to do the work of politics, occasionally relieved by a hesitant optimism, could be said to characterize the whole tradition of so-called Western Marxism to which Marcuse and the rest of the Frankfurt School belonged, many of whose unfinished projects and unresolved questions came to be inherited, knowingly or not, by French critical sociology and American cultural studies. Western Marxism (not just Marcuse, Adorno, and Benjamin but Lukács, Sartre, Althusser, et cetera) paid special attention to culture and ideology and correspondingly neglected the issues of political strategy and economic analysis that so preoccupied earlier generations of Marxist thinkers. As Perry Anderson pointed out in Considerations on Western Marxism, this cultural turn, beginning in the ’20s and in full swing by the ’30s, took place amid political disappointment: the defeat of working-class revolt in Germany, the hardening of the Soviet Union into Stalinist deformity, fascist victory in the Spanish Civil War, and so on.

Cultural considerations wax as political hopes wane. As a rule of thumb, this seems to work well enough for our own era, whether you date it to the late ’70s, when the revolutionary reflux of the ’60s abated, or the ’90s, when the neoliberal end-of-history was trumpeted amid the disorderly retreat of the left in one country after another. In the ’70s, left intellectuals felt a keen disappointment over their failure to play their alleged historic role in coordinating working-class advance. This caused plenty of Marxists to shed that designation altogether. For the rest, it usually occasioned introversion of some kind. In the US, Fredric Jameson cultivated an American variety of Western Marxism, with the same ideo-cultural concerns. In France, Bourdieu (himself a sort of Marxist) and other critical sociologists revealed the self-contradictory character of bien-pensant progressivism: “advanced” taste and thinking actually lent themselves to a regressive stabilization of class and status. And it doesn’t seem too great a stretch to see the American reception of Bourdieu, over the last dozen years or so, as the darkening into starless despair of the gloomy mood typical of Western Marxism: has complaining about the effects of American capitalism merely been our way of amassing cultural capital, meanwhile bolstering capitalism itself?

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During the 1990s, much of cultural studies in the US strained to grant culture an abidingly negative (in Marcuse’s sense) role. Notoriously, professors could extract politically subversive messages from McDonald’s commercials that passed undetected by other consumers: a method that depended on a model of the interaction of the unconscious mind with deliberative politics too far-fetched, perhaps, to be made explicit. (In retrospect, the cult studs possess the farcical dignity — no small thing — of stoned teenagers struck by the secret messages on TV.) Jameson’s approach has aged better: the artifacts of late capitalism necessarily revealed the contradictions of late capitalism — but it took a Marxist lens to see as much. This kind of cultural criticism, more intellectually satisfying, nevertheless led straight to political frustration: the entire Marxist lexicon, like that of other varieties of Theory from which it now borrowed, made it impossible for the college-bred radical to communicate with ordinary middle- and working-class Americans in anything like the language in which she wrote her articles or books. (In Babel’s Red Cavalry, a young revolutionary journalist reads aloud an article by Lenin to a group of illiterate Cossacks. “He hits the truth right away,” one Cossack says afterwards. “Like a chicken pecking a seed.”) The very discourse, including the word discourse, of the intellectual left only widened the gap — between bourgeois intellectual and wage-laborer, to use two more hopeless terms — that the left meant to narrow and, one day, close. To people outside hospitable campuses and coffee shops, leftist intellectuals, Marxist or not, sounded like snobs flaunting class privilege rather than attacking it — while the intellectuals themselves found they could only bear an otherwise unbearable society by self-administering a lot of difficult art and critical theory. Thus did the affirmative character of culture overtake even the implacable negations of the intellectual left.

The generalization of the sociology of culture, both within the academy and among demographic enclaves outside it, looks like an endgame maneuver in the match between oppositional culture and neoliberal politics. It expresses a contemporary intimation that no part of culture any longer casts the faintest shadow of negation: everybody’s cultural diet just confirms their place in the food chain. The feeling that people who like this or that writer or musician are just exactly the people who would can be cynical or despairing, but either way it’s been hard not to feel. In this context, it can seem that our left-wing cultural politics have ended by vindicating the awesome indomitability of global capitalism. Let idiosyncratic taste be exposed as anonymous social structure — this will only reinforce the same structure. Or let desis onto TV shows and a black man into the White House — these open gestures of antiracism will give cover to an American racism that dares not speak its name but isn’t nearly so shy about violence: nothing like a shot of diversity to chase a liter of New Jim Crow.

The same trap ensnares our own content, as writing is now generically called. Trotsky, in Literature and Revolution (1924), defined the word in a sense not entirely unrelated to the contemporary one. The content of every literary school, he wrote, was “a definite social and group attitude toward the world”: “The idea of content does not refer to subject matter, in the ordinary sense of the term, but to social purpose. A lyric without a theme can express an epoch or a class or its point of view as well as a social novel.” Trotsky nevertheless believed that prerevolutionary Russian culture had borne a diversity of combustible, conflictual contents, and made an express distinction between the writings of “the nobleman who did not doubt himself” and “the repentant nobleman.” In our time, privileged penitence counts for less. More and more the social purpose and, therefore, deep content of all culture has seemed one identical substance: the content is capital, and its purpose to reproduce capitalism.

What is to be done? How can left-wing intellectuals or artists, who either came from privilege or acquired its trappings on their march through the institutions, advance their stated politics instead of just underscoring the borderlines of their demographic niche and contributing their little bit of momentum to the juggernaut of the system? Doesn’t the intellectual and cultural left just reinforce, through its class character, the system it would decry? By now everyone, right or left, knows to ask the rhetorical question. Hence the jingoist conservatives of the Weekly Standard, in a post entitled “Hipster Marxism,” on the new neo-Marxist journal Jacobin: editor Bhaskar Sunkara, the Standard observed, “was raised in Westchester County, one of the country’s wealthiest suburbs. He attended George Washington University, ranked as America’s most expensive college while he was there. . . . Sunkara, you’ll be pleased to hear, has book deals now and makes regular appearances on MSNBC, so he seems to be getting what he wants out of life. But how is this supposed to help the masses?”

Gotcha, the system says, chuckling as it too gets what it wants out of planetary life. Thank you, leftists, for your contribution to our shared enterprise. Every penny of your cultural capital helps.

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And yet — and yet—

Things are changing. Local symptoms of the unfolding global crisis aren’t just the further destitution of the American poor, the culling of the middle class, and the somehow uninterrupted concentration of wealth among parasitic financiers. Inside the general disaster, a crisis in the principal institutions of intellectual life — academia and publishing — has been deepening. One tenure-track opening exists for every four new PhDs; the figure is worse for the social sciences, and still worse for humanities. Hundreds of applicants vie for jobs at third-tier colleges paying barely middle-class salaries; the losers end up as adjuncts or “course managers,” tossed two or three grand per semester-long class. Many a promising young person goes to graduate school in flight from a brutal labor market — only to encounter the same beast, grown more ferocious during the interval, a few years down the line. Now you’re well qualified to teach “Insecure: The Cultural Politics of Neoliberalism” (a course offered by the CUNY English Department in the spring of 2011), if only they would let you. Tenure-track professors meanwhile fear that cost-free MOOCs — massive open online courses — will before long administer the coup de grace to the professoriate that a thousand right-wing screeds against tenured radicals could never quite accomplish.

Other intellectuals look, fondly, to freelance journalism and/or book publishing to grant them a living, in spite of the fact that producing content is increasingly done for little or no pay and that the ranks of midlist authors at corporate houses have been thinning, for at least twenty years, faster than those of the middle class. Try rehearsing this chant between ninety-minute writing sessions:

Content wants to be free
But I enjoy my chains.
All content is capital.
The capital’s not mine.
Capitalism! Suicide!
I blog for the Borg.

If it’s getting harder for most people to make a decent living, it’s getting harder, faster, for intellectuals too. “In general,” Trotsky wrote, “the place of art is at the rear of historic advance.” Today, many intellectuals, writers, and artists can at least consider themselves in the middle of an advancing social precariousness.

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Logically, there seem to be three possible results of the mounting economic insecurity of intellectuals and “culture producers” amid a general population scoured by the same blast. The possibilities are hardly exclusive; all three are to some extent inevitable, and already taking place. It’s the proportions in which they’re realized that will answer for our own time a question about the relationship between intellectuals and the general populace classically formulated by Marxism in terms of “hegemony” and “cultural revolution.”

One possibility, and the worst, would be to see the next decades exacerbate the class character of culture. In this scenario, since very few people not already wealthy would risk careers as writers or artists, certain vital strains of culture would become, more exclusively than today, the expression of an upper-class stratum. A basic relegation of literature, art, and philosophy to pastimes of the idly rich (as, say, in prerevolutionary France) doesn’t seem impossible.

A second possibility, closer to realization today, would be the confinement of important varieties of culture not to a single socioeconomic stratum but to demographic archipelagos amid rising seas of mass corporate product. Young people might give up hopes of gainful employment through art or serious writing — without giving up the production or consumption of those things. Holding down uninspiring and ill-paid day-jobs, they would huddle together in select neighborhoods of big cities and devote their evenings and weekends to culture (and laundry, shopping, and cleaning). This doesn’t sound so bad; it sounds in fact like the cozily disappointed existence, streaked with fear of unemployment, of half the people we know.

But the confinement of much cultural production to the leisure hours of a few bohemian enclaves entails real costs for the resulting culture. Challenging art and radical thought, with no hope of a large audience truly susceptible to being challenged, slip easily into administering “provocativeness” to the jadedly unprovokable. The idea of an avant-garde leading a general charge becomes, as it has, impossible; the infantry of a would-be popular audience has deserted, and an officer corps with no troops merely redesigns its uniforms according to cycles of fashion. Squabbles over medals and rank take the place of what Gramsci called the war of position; cultural hegemony — a prevailing climate of opinion — is left, uncontested, to capitalism.

A more optimistic third possibility glimpses, in the dark cloud already raining on us, a silver lining of cultural revolution — of rapprochement, that is, between intellectuals and nonintellectuals, the intellectuals becoming more like workers and the workers more like intellectuals without the broadening of cultural life diminishing its liveliness or highest achievements. On the contrary, per Trotsky: “The powerful force of competition which, in bourgeois society, has the character of market competition, will not disappear in Socialist society, but, to use the language of psychoanalysis, will be sublimated, that is, will assume a higher and more fertile form. There will be the struggle for one’s opinion, for one’s project, for one’s taste. . . . Art will then become more general . . . the most perfect method of the progressive building of life in every field. It will not be merely ‘pretty’ without relation to anything else.”

In the famous concluding vision of Literature and Revolution, cultural revolution is not a leveling, but a tectonic upthrust. As culture one day becomes the common property of all, “The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise.”

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Is there a way to make toward these summits from the neoliberal foothills of today?

We are witnessing and sometimes personally experiencing a sharp de-classing of intellectuals. Our precious credentials are increasingly useless for generating income and — let us hope — social prestige, too. This should mean that most intellectuals view ourselves as sinking, economically, into the lower-middle or working class, and that “meritocratic” markers — the contents of our bookshelves and iPods; our degrees — accord us less and less social status in our own and others’ eyes. Not to say there won’t remain a self-protective cultural elite hoarding its prestige: the hostility to criticism among mutually appreciative writers, artists, and academics — an aversion to meaningful disputes — is contemporary evidence of such a siege mentality. But we can also hope for something else: perhaps intellectuals’ increasing exposure to socioeconomic danger will give a new political dangerousness and reality to what some of us produce. Might the continuing commitment of de-classed left intellectuals and radical artists to their vocations, in spite of withered prospects and eroding prestige, give our work an antisystemic force, and credibility, it has lacked?

In recent decades, varieties of politics among intellectuals, hipsters, artists, and academics have seemed to outsiders, and increasingly to ourselves, like just so many types of functionally affirmative, system-stabilizing, content-neutral cultural capital. In the years ahead it may become easier, while much else becomes harder, for both left intellectuals and our intended audience to believe that we do what we do and say what we say for the sake of conviction, not capital. Artists and intellectuals, to go on existing in serious numbers without much help from universities, corporate publishers, wealthy families, and rich patrons, will be groups marked by some sacrifice. And if we want to work hard—“Il faut travailler, rien que travailler,” Cézanne wrote to Rilke: probably the one common motto of artists and thinkers — many of us may quit the demographic islands where our very concentration drives up the rent. Released, unprotected, into the dark fields of the republic, we would find new things to say and, with luck, new people to say them to.

Cultural revolution or the struggle for a new left hegemony — call it what you like, but the proletarianization of bohemia may lead to a ProBo challenge to the Bobo consensus on the irresistible embourgeoisement of all culture. To use old Marxist language (perhaps somewhat refreshed from a long historical nap), the conflict would be between “organic” intellectuals, allied with the working class, and “traditional” ones convinced of their independence despite relying on and reinforcing the ruling class. The organic intellectuals wouldn’t only be those emerging from the working class but many falling into it. Nor does this rule out the economically comfortable radical of the Engels type — but calls for an insurgency against your own class become more meaningful if and when insurgency seems like a real threat. There exists a chance, anyway, that closer consorting between culture and the rest of life, and among intellectuals and nonintellectuals, will do something to fulfill the old dream of the aestheticization of society, the socialization of art, and the corresponding regeneration of both. This, too, belonged to the program of socialism and cultural revolution.

What, practically, do we mean by such rhetoric? That’s what we have to find out — or else we have produced one more sonorous elite hypocrisy. Reformable institutions should be reformed, and unreformable ones abandoned or replaced. Figuring out what’s reformable is the trick: how about the university, for instance? Until a new system of “higher and continuing education” is in place, adjuncts should be paid better, grad students should unionize, and we should demand that college be made free, at a cost of merely 2 or 3 percent of GDP. These are battles worth fighting. But new institutions are needed too, and more of us should be setting up progressive continuing-ed schools that charge small fees (like the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, in the middle of New York), or low-overhead cost-free ones (like Deep Springs College, in the middle of nowhere). That’s to name two institutions with elite connotations, but, as in Engels’s second law of dialectics, a change of quantity can become one of quality. The more of these schools that come into existence, the easier it becomes to detach education from the reproduction of class privilege. Every new independent reading group or research collective marks a step in the right direction.

The ongoing proletarianization of intellectuals prompts any number of further questions. Should we abandon the corporate publishers before they abandon us? So far we haven’t done so, but we’ve tried — as have many others — to fill the gaps left by the industry’s consolidation and caution. In our own work, should we tend toward more “accessible” language and popular forms — or take the increasing hopelessness of making a living from writing as license to experiment? In search of cheaper rents and fertile ground for new institutions, should we leave Brooklyn and make for the provinces? (Will we cross our displaced academic friends fleeing the other way?) Or do we stay and fight for rent control and the right to the city? And how to reply to the familiar reproach: If you want to change and not just interpret the world, why not give up writing and become an organizer or activist? Part of the answer, at least, is that learning to organize, like learning to write, takes years, and you can’t just substitute one job for the other — we will have to be amateur activists. Another part is that if activists are indispensable, so are intellectuals. The words of Adorno in “Sociology and Empirical Research” (1957), arguing for the Frankfurt School’s own version of critical sociology, come to mind: “Not only theory but also its absence becomes a material force when it seizes the masses.” Just this — for theorists and the masses alike — has been our problem.

These tentative answers to the whole perplex of culture and politics can also be taxed with vagueness and no doubt confusion. We’re trying to figure what to do from an unstable position amid crumbling institutions and generalized crisis. More than one variety of brave and honest, necessarily incomplete response to the dilemma can surely be offered, and still more varieties of evasive bullshit: a good ear will know the difference. We can’t bring ourselves to cheer the failure of institutions that have sustained us — but we can at least be grateful that the collapsing structures are carrying out a sort of structural rescue of meaningful individual choice, in politics and culture. Bobo or ProBo? Siege mentality (“We writers are in this together!”) or sorties beyond the walls: “We’re in this with almost everyone!”? Reform existing institutions, or replace them, or cultivate your own garden, or retire to your Unabomber cabin? Join the traditional intellectuals and seek patronage among think tanks, foundations, rich individuals, and multinational corporations, or do something for cultural revolution? Not that the old Marxist jargon matters too much, adopted or abandoned. What counts is history asking us a question — about our content or purpose in a society of accelerating insecurity, including our own — that one way or another we need to formulate as sharply as possible, since we answer it with our lives.

This article appears in Issue 16: Double Bind, available now. Subscribe now to receive the issue.

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The Singer and the Prince

2013-04-26T16:00:00Z

by Nisha Susan

How did the singer meet the prince? In all stories of love, we must know how the lovers met, how they met again, how they almost missed each other and, sometimes, how they never met.

The singer and the prince should have had a chorus in the background when they first met. At the very least, they should have had a fight. Her scooter hits his cycle. His cycle hits her horse cart. They don’t have misomeru (the feeling on first meeting that this is just the person you've been looking for), but eventually, in hindsight, they have koi no yokan (the feeling on first meeting that this is going to tumble into love). But how does one manage vehicular collision on the internet, and why would the prince and the singer have Japanese feelings? Since this is not my story, you don’t have to listen to me rambling on about what I want.

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About the Singer

Small-town women who run away to the city are like the Powerpuff Girls with cute, overly feminine clothes and superpowers. The singer was a small-town girl who ambled cityward and stayed in Bangalore till no one knew that her past contained ten-kilometre walks to school.

The singer was a big woman with big eyes, wild hair and great mounds of soft flesh. She did not think of herself as fat, and hence funny. She rarely poked jokes at her own abundance and was startled when others, expecting her to be cool, did. When they saw her astonished expression they cringed and rarely ribbed her again. Men were ashamed of how badly they wanted to nuzzle her and how much they wanted to fuck her some afternoons. They plotted ways of enjoying her in secret, like a box of unfashionable sweets. Women who were not very perceptive said in admiring tones that the singer was very comfortable with her body.

The truth was that for many years, the singer had never thought of her body at all. Then one day, oh cursed day, rushing past a shiny surface she caught sight of her reflection and was frozen by the thought that this was what other people saw.

On her scooter she didn't sing much that day. What if she’d been small and thin like other Kannadiga girls, with soft brown eyes and fragile shoulders? Or tall and thin? Or a man? Or had no body at all? Wouldn’t it have been wonderful if people were just minds? And voices, of course, voices. The singer’s own voice shook badly-built houses and well-protected hearts, but when small men saw where the voice came from, they quailed, shivered, smiled lopsided smiles and talked loudly. Small town girls have x-ray vision that makes the scaffolding of pretence visible. She did not sigh, but she did despair at ever falling in love.

How They Met

She took on very few students and found most of them tiresome. One of them, a girl who could sense light from dark but could see no more than that, also had the tendency to fall in love with someone new every few months. The blind girl met her lovers at her numerous musical lessons scattered across the city. A madrigal singer here, a cellist there, and a mridangam artiste in Malleswaram. One weekend she dragged the singer to show her the newest object of her affections, the lead singer of a rock band. After the gig at a small, noisy Brigade Road pub, he came by and said hello to the student. The singer watched with interest as her student arched towards his smoky Austin Town Tamil-accented voice. Unlike the teacher, the student could not see the kindly but slightly puzzled expression on the man’s face. The student was in love with him for some months before she moved to the scratchy timbre of a jazz pianist who had just moved to Cox Town.

One day the student announced that she was in love with a lovely man, a music engineer from the US, and that she was meeting-him-for-the-first-time this weekend. First-time? The singer was told that the student’s newest pool of kindly musical men had been found on the internet. The music engineer and she had met online and been chatting for weeks. He was coming home on holiday and was dying to meet her.

When was the last time the singer had had sex? She couldn't remember. Meanwhile, little chits like her student who had strong feelings about guarding their virginity were meeting men all the time. The net, was it? The singer had left her small town and come to Bangalore with no worries about fitting in. She took to the internet without fear and without expectations.

The singer found lots of music chat rooms and was at first desperately bored. Offline, she had always behaved as if her classical training was only good for stories of folly and pretension. She had eschewed performing in the katcheri circuit altogether a long time ago, unwilling to genuflect that much every day. She went occasionally to a concert when she suspected the performer may not live to do another show. She professed a great love for old Bollywood instead. But the heart is not egalitarian. This was 2003 and most of the chatrooms had men whose "favorite singer" was AR Rahman. Rather swiftly, she fled looking for the classical music chatrooms, where she was puzzled to discover that everyone there was worried about Indian culture; and the men specifically wanted her photo with Indian culture or wanted her photo without Indian culture.

The singer told none of her friends about how she walked fast and guiltily through these rooms hoping for a kindred soul. Someone for whom the music in his head made the world less banal, as it did for her. Someone who had a body but would not see hers. After a while, she began picking fights with the men she met in these chatrooms and they either skittered away or stayed on to fight peevishly.

To all women in search of a story there eventually must come a prince. Across a crowded chatroom their eyes met.

prince_nakshatram: How can you say that my guru is terrible? He is wonderful.

thumri_girl: Pyare rasiya bihari, suniyo arz hamari.

prince_nakshatram: Lol. I’ve not heard that one for a long long time. Bade Ghulam Ali?

thumri_girl: Full marks but I insist that your guru’s voice is too nasal.

prince_nakshatram: Fellow!!! He is a gem of a person and a great musician.

thumri_girl: Gem-kyem, I don’t know. That nasal voice!

prince_nakshatram: In classical music, what is important, not how.

thumri_girl: Please saaar! I’ve heard those stories before. Don’t give me lecture and think that I won’t notice terrible voices.

For a few days they typed violently and musically at each other, paused and sat back, only to type some more. Then her mobile phone rang and the prince had a voice.

Voice to Voice, Lip to Lip

thumri_girl: God bless Skype.

prince_nakshatram: God bless Skype.

The prince and the singer blessed Skype many times over the next few months. The singer was newly capable of flirtation. She was Gargi, she was Maitreyi, but she had oomph. She continued to criticize his favorite musicians. He only laughed and stayed to argue and sing at her, addressing her as if she was a drawing room audience in Dharwad.

Eventually, she could not resist telling her friends about her nocturnal adventures between the Indian and Austrian time zones. Friends of lovers usually introduce unwelcome prosaic notes, but in this case the element I introduced was one that heightened the drama. I told the singer kindly that from the clues he’d been dropping in their chats and conversations, he most probably was a real prince, a crown prince from violently democratic south India.

Me: Have you Googled him?

thumri_girl: Shut up!

Me: Then I’ll do it for you.

Despite her protestations, the prince was Googled and unmasked. It hadn’t been much of a mask, anyway, just one of those that elegantly reveal the nose and manly jawline, leaving only silly girls in doubt of his identity.

thumri_girl: You didn’t tell me, da.

prince_nakshatram: I’m sorry. It’s nice to be here and talk music with someone not from the concert circuit, someone who doesn’t know me, my gurus, my uncles and my mother.

I reminded the singer that royalty had a reputation for wandering incognito, usually on quests to win a prize or gain wisdom from new experiences, but she didn’t really need such an explanation. The singer was kind and railed against neither fat nor fact.

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How They Met Again

The singer cannot be imagined without her blue Kinetic Honda. On this scooter she ran errands for her mother, who sculpted gods out of granite. Her mother was just as likely to send her to argue with a pious client about the size of a statue as she was to send her to fetch vegetables.

On this scooter she rode to a katcheri organized by Hindu fundoos and sang thumris composed by her Muslim guru, her first guru, the one who she’d left as a teenager and whose own guru’s tomb in Gujarat was festooned with burning tires a few years ago. On this scooter she rode to the hospital early one morning to look at the corpse of a friend who’d hung herself while her two lovers quarrelled outside. On this scooter she rode to rescues and consolations, to cigarettes and coffee and upma.

Her scooter is what she missed the most when she went to the prince’s Kerala palace to study his music. Every time she wanted to pee he drove her to the nearest Taj hotel. It does not matter that you are Brahmin, he told her. To my family you are an outsider who should only use the servants’ bathrooms. She sat impassive and grand in the passenger seat of the old Mercedes and fantasised about riding up to the palace in her blue scooter, parking it in the driveway and walking in with her helmet in her left hand.

She had imagined that the palace would be on higher ground, with a driveway that began with lions on top of pillars. She had imagined there would be sentries in livery. Instead there had been three tall men in safari suits and quiet moustaches.

The prince had taught her three words to say to these men who guarded the palace from commoners and garlic. She should say, "Thampuran. Pattu. Padikyan." "His Highness. Song. Study." The guards had fallen about laughing and sent for someone to take her inside. The singer thought of the television show about Mrignayani, the Gujjar girl Maharaja Man Singh Tomar had met while out hunting. He’d fallen in love with her when he saw her separate two buffalo, horns locked in combat, with her bare hands. Walking through the palace the singer felt like Mrignayani must have felt when she thought it would be okay to appear in her traditional clothes in the royal court.

Did Man Singh and Mrignayani have a threesome with their guru Baiju Bawra, the singer thought distractedly as she was escorted into the presence of the prince. He was drinking tea.

Fleshmeet is the technical term, she thought as he stood up to greet her. Meat. There was no doubt that the prince was a substantial man, much bigger than his font size. A man who matched his voice, had no nervous tics or fluttering fingers. Her mind flew to her first guru, a tiny, skinny, grinning man from Dharwad who smoked cigarette after cigarette sitting cross-legged on any available flat surface. He had always looked less like a legendary ustad with diamond-hard standards than like the man who hands you bananas and milk at the corner shop.

The prince and the singer had a five-day musical interlude before she went back to Bangalore and he flew to Salzburg.

A month later, he sent her a tiny white gift.

Ride a cockhorse to this i-Pod cross

And see my fine lady ride on a white horse.

Rings on her fingers and bells on her toes

She shall have music wherever she goes.

The singer was ecstatic. She couldn’t understand when she had stopped listening to music. She couldn’t understand how she had not had this before. She couldn’t understand how the universe had made it possible for all its musicians to sit lightly on her shoulder, hang nimbly from her earlobes and sing. She was sitting in Cubbon Park. One of the passing women begging for their vacant-eyed infants spat at her feet. Two men masturbated sporadically in front of her for two hours. The sun crossed the sky and policemen came to frighten decent women home. She didn’t move, didn’t shift, didn’t squirm on the concrete bench.

She rode home that night without the music playing in her ears. She smiled when bus horns shrieked and trumpeted. That night in her dreams the prince was a giant straddling continents. A week later, her friends were startled to hear that the singer had consented to sing, had herself organised a small concert in someone’s living room.

"Really? Really?" they asked each other and, more carefully, her. Perhaps she would finally give up the job where she told people from Millersville and Beavers Fall and Middlebury what their credit limits were. She didn’t, but several small living room congregations over the next year clutched their hearts when she sang.

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Why she had left

A year passed. The prince returned and they met at the palace again to sing to each other. One evening at the Taj, post outcaste-tinkle, they drank bad coffee. Mid-conversation, he clapped her on the shoulder. The singer sighed. It was the death-knell of romance, she knew. So the conversation that followed didn’t surprise her as much as it should have.

"Why are you so crass, man?" the prince asked.

‘Crass? What is crass?’ Like many other people, the singer only knew as many words in English as she needed to know.

The prince waved his soft hands. "Crass means rude. Low-class." Now the prince cringed as he heard the words coming out of his mouth. "You smoke all the time. You hardly sleep. You do these random performances for people who don’t know anything about Hindustani music. You don’t believe in morning riyaaz. It’s because you’ve left serious music behind and begun working among these uncultured BPO types."

The singer laughed. "Even Gangubai needed to pay the bills and feed her children."

"But Gangubai did it through music!" he protested.

Let me tell you a story, she said.

The singer told the prince many stories that day. But the first one was enough. When she was 22 and keenly studying music with her second guru, she attended concerts feverishly. Not a syllable was sung in Bangalore without her hearing it. For the bigger concerts she would beg ticket favors, sneak in, stand in the aisles, try to plaster herself to the walls. And as her face became better known, smaller organizers who needed bums on seats would call her and her best friend. Those days the singer liked being liked and broke no rules. She touched the feet of elders, washed her guru's clothes, ran his errands and kept her mouth shut and smiling.

The story begins on an evening when the marquee event was a husband and wife duo— brilliant vocalists legendary for their joint performances. Marquee being a loose description when the event was unadvertised, organized at a time of day when only the truly unemployed could attend and held in a Malleswaram high school.

Ten minutes before the event came the news that the accompanist was stuck in a traffic jam. The singer was asked if she would accompany the couple on the tanpura. This turned out to be an unfortunate vantage position. The couple, seated close to each other and smiling at the genteel audience, was surreptitiously and violently pinching and clawing each other even as they sang the ragas newspapers always described as "mellifluous." Each wanted the other one’s voice to halt so their own could fly out and wrap itself around the solid mass of attending Kanjeevaram sarees. Afterwards, watching the pair put on ethereal airs, she knew she could never listen to them again. It was the first of many incidents that led her to the safe, anaemic BPO where she worked.

Having told her stories and made the prince laugh, she also saw for the first time how embarrassed the prince was by any unpleasantness, by crassness. She was convinced she’d always be his "bold" and "unusual" friend, not an object of romance. Her terracotta heart now had a hairline crack. He didn’t love her. He didn’t want her. This was as clear to her as if he had typed it out for her.

Another year passed. The prince visited her many times in Bangalore coffee shops. She visited the palace again. On one visit she casually greeted a wraith in the corridor, but it glared at her and glided away. "That was my mother, the Maharani!" the shocked prince told her. "No one just says hello to her." The singer was unimpressed. The previous weekend at home, she had heard loud laughter and gone out into the courtyard. Her old mother was sitting astride the granite shoulder of her new Vishwamitra and waving her chisel in the air. "Look kanna, I’ve done such a bad job. He looks like that chief minister after he had the stroke. The Saptarishi Ashram will never hire me again!" What is a mere queen after that?

The prince was as admiring of the singer as if she had separated fighting buffaloes. He told her of his fear and hate of the hard women of his household, who bullied him and decided what he should eat and how he should eat it. Only his music was left alone, entrusted in the hands of his soft-bellied gurus. He likes me because I’m too big to be a woman, she thought.

I dismissed this line of thought: King Cophetua was never interested in females, he was only interested in feeling good about himself. I said it to console her. King who? she asked. Famous fairy tale. There was a king. One day he saw a beggar-girl, fell in love with her, and raised her to be his queen. Cophetua: the singer rolled the name around in her mouth.

The beauty

The drawing room concerts continued—sometimes shattering furniture to kindling and sometimes not. Sometime that year, on an off-day she looked about on Orkut for music lovers and found them still fixated on AR Rahman and Jagjit Singh. She was thinking of deleting her account when she discovered a fake Jagjit Singh having an uproarious fight with a fake Lata Mangeshkar. She stayed in the peanut gallery and enjoyed herself.

The singer smoked much more now, something she learnt to do stylishly among the hijras whose company she’d wandered into. She had met Soundarya at a dark bus stop where she was hustling languidly. The singer found her funny and sweet and took to hanging out with her friends, and on rare occasions, at the Ulsoor hamam where Soundarya and her guru lived in a constant state of negotiation. Could Soundarya wear pants? Occasionally, and far from the hamam, her guru relented after weeks of Soundarya's teasing and arguing. "I think I’ll buy myself a denim mini-skirt," Soundarya responded. The guru roared, "You’re so lucky I’m not chucking you out, as my guru would have!" Soundarya said the equivalent of whatev’s and merrily continued to scandalize her sari-wearing, flower-festooned sisters. Generation gap, the older hijra complained to the singer.

With Soundarya and in the hamaam the singer felt at home, both warmly accepted and a sexual object, as if this wasn’t like trying to pat your stomach and rub your head at the same time. When she took Soundarya to meet the prince it was a slightly malicious gesture. The prince had come to Bangalore to see her and, as usual, to persuade her that she must return to serious music before it was too late. And certainly she shouldn’t ride about in the night on her scooter, smoking cigarettes and killing her voice.

She secretly hoped that the prince would smell the street and dark corners and unpleasant evenings on Soundarya and be frightened by how much his friend had moved away from respectability and the starched katcheri circuit. Even her unflappable mother had been startled at the news of these recent friendships. But with the first few syllables of introduction, she knew she had cut off her nose to spite her face. She didn’t delude herself by thinking that he would run when he discovered that Soundarya was not a woman. The prince had fallen in love.

Over the next week the singer barely saw him, and always, with Soundarya. Room service, running water and thick towels gave Soundarya serenity last bestowed on Julia Roberts. Soundarya’s hoarse, gentle voice was barely audible as it whispered and rasped near the prince’s ears.

Both Soundarya and the prince had moved beyond her, leaving her in the land of the crass and unlovable.

Soon the prince made arrangements for Soundarya to go to Salzburg with him. With extreme reluctance she wore shirt-pants and cut her hair and was passport-photo’ed into sullen Santosh Siddalingiah.

The singer’s friends watched to see if she would fade away in heartbreak, but she stayed whole as the marble, founded as the rock. With the appalling insensitivity of new jubilant lovers, the prince had told her before he left, "If you don’t start practicing seriously, you’ll lose your voice. I’m not sure whether it hasn’t been damaged already from neglect." The singer bit back her desire to hit him and to tell him that his mother would stew him in garlic when she found out about Soundarya.

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The funeral

Now the emails from Austria came with photos. They talked a lot on Skype since the couple wanted her to hear their happiness, not just see them in winterwear. Besides, Soundarya, her lovely, warm friend who would have been a more entertaining correspondent could barely write in English. The singer grimly replied to these emails with many smileys (as she did to the ones from her former student who had flown to the US with her music-engineer boyfriend. The girl had said that it was better to be blind in America than sighted in India).

In every email the prince urged the singer to perform more and to bigger audiences. Take on more students. They’ll pay your bills. Give up the bloody call centre. It’s ruining your voice.

The singer was on the verge of ending the annoying correspondence for good when the "Mother serious" mail arrived. This subject line was obviously Soundarya’s idea of humor, because the prince himself was devastated. The family had found out, arrived in Salzburg and ordered that he break all ties with this "freak." They’d threatened her, bribed her, been cold to her, attempted to disrobe her, and tried all the other tactics known to angry royalty down the ages. Soundarya walked away, naked and amused, to sun herself on the small Viennese balcony. The family returned home and organized a ritual to declare the prince dead.

Later, on her webcam, the singer saw the prince clutch his soft, straight hair and say, "Padi adachu, pindam vacchu. They shut their doors and conducted my funeral. I’m not sure if even my gurus will talk to me."

The singer gave up her initial schadenfreude and set about applying her fine common sense to the situation.

Small-town girls have superpowers. She convinced the prince that the family would die before telling anyone he was in love with a hijra. The funeral was to frighten him into returning home, and then they’d declare him undead. If he felt like going home he could go without taking Soundarya. It was not the end of the world. Or he could take her home with him and find out if it really was.

How would his half-blind 90-year-old guru in Chennai guess Soundarya was a hijra? And what about Bal Gandharva? What about him, the prince wanted to know. The singer had to admit here that she’d just thrown in Bal Gandharva without thinking it through, but the rest of the stuff she knew for sure. The prince had to be a grown-up now and stop shouting at his amma.

For weeks she wrote dozens of emails trying to cheer him up and stiffen his backbone. One of her subject lines was: To the artiste formerly known as Prince. I’d ventured this joke and it had amused the singer a great deal. Finally, her ceaseless emails seemed to work. He made a quick visit to the palace without Soundarya. His mother refused to see him but he threatened the rest of the family with dire things if they didn’t lay off the drama. Such as? Such as sending his wedding photos to the press. Such as getting married to Soundarya. It’s allowed in Austria, you know, sort of, he blustered to the blanched family. He flew back trembling.

The singer said as cheerily as she could on Skype, “I didn’t know you had it in you.” Soundarya guffawed peering into the screen, “Neither did I.”

The prince was slowly restored to his expansive self, urging her to do riyaaz more often. She was careful not to tell him that she had given notice at the BPO. She didn’t want him to have any more ammunition.

She bought a new scooter with her last full-time salary from the call center. What was a girl to do with this free time? She rarely had the old impulse now to ride wildly through the flower stalls, singing loudly, scattering Russell Market before her. She didn’t blame the scooter. Though she did periodically wish it was as dented and dusty as her old one. This new thing seemed alien to her shabby self.

Three months later the scooter was slightly less shiny. One night, the singer went into the bathroom for a shower. One of her mother’s chisels lay on the counter where her mother had abandoned it. She picked it up. She stood absentmindedly on the cold floor, flexing her arm and enjoying its weight. She held it over her right breast. Imagine cutting your flesh off. She contemplated the cool, horizontal line of the blade pressing into her skin. And suddenly her hand trembled with the effort of not cutting herself.

She might have wept, her once-a-year crying jag, when she heard her mother’s fat laughter from the dim courtyard. She looked out of the bathroom window and saw that her mother, in response to the urgent and prudish desires of her clients, was painting a pale pink loincloth over a plaster-of-paris sadhu’s crotch. Spotting her face at the window, her mother waved.

The singer giggled, ate two badams to improve her memory and went to bed. The next morning she woke at 5 AM and sang.

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Revoltingly Edible

2013-04-24T16:00:00Z

On Hilary Mantel

by Namara Smith

Image: Hans Holbein the Younger, Thomas Cromwell, c. 1533.

Hilary Mantel. Wolf Hall. Henry Holt and Co., 2009.
Hilary Mantel. Bring Up the Bodies. Henry Holt and Co., 2012.

Near the beginning of Hilary Mantel’s Eight Months on Ghazzah Street (1988), the novel’s main character, a young English woman who has just arrived in Saudi Arabia, pauses as she joins her husband in the living room of their company-furnished apartment for the first time. She can’t decide where to sit; although the room is filled with chairs, none are placed so that two people can sit facing each other and talk. As she hesitates, wondering if dragging a seat into a better angle would seem “unreasonably portentous,” this detail expands threateningly, and behind the arrangement of furniture appears the outline of a broader social arrangement prohibiting equal conversation between spouses.

Mantel’s novels take shape through the gradual accumulation of these moments of dissonance, moving outward from uncomfortable and unpleasant details to suggest larger patterns of menace and disorder. Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, partly drawn from Mantel’s experience during the Saudi oil boom of the early ’80s, begins with a precise description of the new construction fueled by the country’s rapid increase in wealth: “On every vacant lot in time appears the jumble of brownish brick, the metal spines of scaffolding, the sheets of plate glass; then last of all the marble, the most popular facing material, held on to the plain walls behind it with some sort of adhesive.” Inside these buildings, the hallways and staircases are also coated with marble, of the irregular flesh-colored shade “flecked with black and a fatty cream, revoltingly edible, like some kind of Polish sausage” popular among government officials of particularly corrupt regimes.

Lured to the Persian Gulf by the quick profits promised by advisory consulting roles on government projects, Mantel’s English expatriates spend their allotted time haggling over gold-plated jewelry, brewing wine illegally in their bathtubs, and holding elaborate dinner parties with other English people whom they hate. After they drink too much, the men become casually racist and the women sneak into the kitchen to eat second and third helpings of dessert. Their faults can be neatly sorted into biblical categories of gluttony, lust, and vanity. Learning of her husband’s new salary, Frances, the main character is “cleanly stabbed by avarice, like a peach with a silver knife.” Mantel expands her condemnation of her characters into a condemnation of the city itself: “When the Jeddah earthquake comes—and it will come—all-seeing Allah will observe that the buildings are held together with glue; and he will peel the city apart like an onion.”

To move from small details to this kind of distant, omniscient perspective, Mantel uses language that is both precise and compressed. Instead of resting on the middle distance, her sentences shift directly between events of different orders of magnitude. Her fifth novel, A Change of Climate (1994), begins, “One day when Kit was ten years old, a visitor cut her wrists in the kitchen. She was just beginning on this cold, difficult form of death when Kit came in to get a glass of milk.” Each line begins and ends with a neutral phrase—Kit’s age, her glass of milk, the kitchen, the bland “she was just beginning”—but the alternation between these mundane observations and the violent act at their center emphasizes the distance between them.

Especially in Mantel’s early novels, this distinctness of expression constantly spills over into her figures of speech. One woman’s legs “[move] like scissors down the street”; another is permeated by other peoples’ words “like needles picking up the skin.” The frequency with which these violent movements of cutting, stabbing, and slicing are repeated reinforces the idea of Mantel’s language as a sharp, sterile blade. This violence is most overt in her first novel, an 800-page account of the French Revolution from the point of view of the Jacobins, which Mantel wrote while she was 23 and working in the women’s clothing section of a large department store.

When she couldn’t sell this manuscript—it was eventually published in 1992 as A Place of Greater Safety—Mantel began writing much shorter books that contained an even greater intensity of tone. Every Day Is Mother’s Day (1985), the first novel she published, is set, like many of Mantel’s early books, in a small town in northern England. Its romantic leads, Isabel, a junior social worker, and Colin, a high school history teacher, meet in a night workshop called “Writing for Fun and Profit.” When the instructor tells them “there’s a book in each of us,” Isabel responds dourly, “I should like mine to be Mansfield Park.” Colin, unhappily married with several children, thinks, “I belong to the generation of Angry Young Men, although I was never angry until it was too late, oh, very late, and even now I am only mildly irritated.” Since they both hate everyone else in their writing workshop, they fall in love. Their affair is miserable almost before it begins: they spend most of it deciding whether to meet for warm gin and flat beer at a series of pubs “smelling of damp fake-furs and warming plastic” or to sit in their unheated car in the middle of a field. Eventually, the car shows signs of sinking into the mud, and they start driving to a highway service area instead. “This is ridiculous,” Colin says. “Nowhere to go. Like kids. Kids do this.”

This note of unfocused, almost bemused aggression is struck by many of Mantel’s early narrators; it is as if they are irritated by so many things they have given up trying to distinguish between real and illusory sources of discomfort. Although they have subsided into nonthreatening social roles—teacher, housewife, ineffectual parish priest—they have vague, sweeping ambitions that lead to occasional quixotic attempts at self-improvement: night classes, daily journal entries, political meetings. But mostly their ambitions express themselves in negative form, through an uncompromising hatred of everything that seems false, pointless, and painful in their lives. The more this list is considered, the more it expands, magnifying small signals into conspiracies and inconveniences into traps.

Increased perception, for these characters, seems to lead mostly to disgust with the world. Mantel dwells on this point at length in An Experiment in Love (1995), a campus novel set in the early 1970s, and the closest thing she has written to a bildungsroman. Its heroine, Carmel, is a scholarship student from a decaying mill town in northern England. She is educated, like Mantel herself, first at a convent school and then a selective London university. An aspiring revolutionary, Carmel joins the student socialist party, but is disappointed to find it dominated entirely by “men with bad teeth from obscure post-graduate specialties” who lecture on points of order, while “in Paris, the ashes of the évènements were hardly cool.” In London, the only apparent revolution is the sudden and decisive rout of the miniskirt in favor of belted trenches and maxi skirts—an aesthetic of the “poised, mysterious and difficult” where women apply lipstick in public and 26 is a more valued age than 16. Carmel, who can’t afford a new wardrobe, is caught barelegged on the wrong side of history.

Like the cloistered nuns who share her name, Carmel moves further within herself as the novel progresses, as if into a walled medieval garden, but she is far from finding an inner principle of order or calm. Instead, she is increasingly unable to control her own thoughts. Stray facts, painful memories, and disjointed lines of verse circulate in her head like debris from a wreck. Even something as small as another girl stirring instant coffee causes Carmel to silently recite T.S. Eliot’s famous line about measuring out life with coffee spoons, before almost instantly chastising herself as too obvious.

At the same time, she cuts her hair into a shingle bob, dyes it a lurid shade of red, and begins to knit a sweater that will locate her definitively as “poised, mysterious and difficult.” It is russet-brown, a reddish shade that clashes with Carmel’s new hair, and has a cowl neck; even the appliqué flowers, beads, and embroidery she adds cannot hide its resemblance to a monk’s habit. When completed, she wears her creation with a borrowed dark-green belt, “crushing and severe,” that compresses her ribcage into an almost triangular shape; by this point she is eating very little. Carmel intends the harsh material, restrictive shape, and sharp contrasts of this form to reflect her contempt for appearances, but they also reflect, unintentionally, her inner confusion and distress.

An Experiment in Love is partly an examination of Mantel’s own style, and the influences that have shaped her sentences. The structure of book consciously echoes The Girls Of Slender Means, Muriel Spark’s short novel about the residents of a women’s dormitory in the 1940s, but Carmel’s red hair, memento mori, and caustic intelligence seem to have more to do with Spark herself than with her characters. Similarly, the lines of poetry that run compulsively through Carmel’s mind suggest both the disembodied verses that interrupt Spark’s book and an episode from the writer’s own life, when, in 1955, overworked, starving, and dependent on the stimulant Dexedrine, Spark became convinced that T.S. Eliot was sending her coded messages in his writing, and suffered a nervous breakdown.

This experience, which led to Spark’s recovery in a Carmelite convent and her conversion to the Roman Catholic Church, was also the basis for her first novel, The Comforters; she changed the visual hallucinations she had experienced into an unseen narrative voice that hounded her heroine and made her feel like a character in a novel. In a way, it seems only fair for Mantel to make Spark a character in her own novel, and, by placing these two sides of Spark’s life alongside each other, to suggest both the external form that Mantel has adopted and the private costs that have gone into creating this distant and sterile language.

An Experiment In Love’s main character also suffers a self-inflicted collapse but she recovers, at least partially. Carmel, who wanted to be the first female prime minister, ends the novel as a suburban housewife watching her more successful classmate on television. She seems to have found a kind of emotional balance, but a private one, unsanctioned by the world.

+ + +

By Wolf Hall, the first in her series of historical novels about Henry VIII’s minister Thomas Cromwell, Mantel’s prose has modulated into a new key. Her writing is still built on the careful accumulation of indirect observations, but the connective tissue of her sentences seems looser, and the sharp lines of her early novels have been replaced by a lavish, almost Elizabethan, vocabulary.

Here are some of the words in Mantel’s Cromwell novels: Guiles, argent, couchant. Estoc. Exsanguinates. Fuckeur. There is hunting; there is jousting. There are sconces, velvet cushions, jellies in the shape of castles, and stuffed piglets. There are songs that can only be described as bawdy. Some descriptions—of the English winter, of court pageants—echo Orlando’s scenes on the frozen Thames. Although the language is not archaic, it is often luxurious: someone’s glance “slides…like silk upon a stone”; hawks fall from the sky “gilt-winged, each with a blood-filled gaze.”

Although they are Mantel’s most expansive books, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies are also her most tightly organized. Their pacing mimics that of an action novel: running through them are sentences with only two words, paragraphs with only two sentences, chapters with only two paragraphs. Imagery is repeated with small variations to set a different tone for each of her main characters: Anne Boleyn dresses in shades of gold and deep red, as if some internal fire made her dangerous to touch; she is taut and focused, her face reduced to its harsh angles, her teeth sharp and white. Her rival Jane Seymour is “a plain young woman with a silvery pallor” and a plump, discreetly dimpled face, who wears grays and pearls, and, after her marriage to Henry, a prim antique headdress.

Minor characters—Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies both have more than a hundred, laid out before each book in comprehensive charts and dramatis personae—are defined by one or two piercing details. The superficially imposing but extremely superstitious Duke of Norfolk “rattles a little as he moves, for his clothes conceal relics: in tiny jeweled cases he has shavings of skin and snippets of hair, and set into medallions he wears splinters of martyrs’ bones.” The much younger wife to an elderly diplomat “wears tawny silk, coral bracelets with gold hearts, and an expression of vigilant dissatisfaction, bordering on the peevish.”

These observations are all filtered through the eyes of Mantel’s main character. When the future Archbishop of Canterbury, describing his past, pauses for a beat too long on the horse, bow, and hawk that his father gave him when he was a child, Cromwell notices quickly: “Dead, he thinks, the father long dead; still looking for his hand in the dark.” As the priest describes his schooling (harsh) and his duty to God (absolute), the successive authorities of his father, his education, and his religion delicately reinforce one another to suggest a comprehensive picture of his character.

Mantel, who rarely boasts of her characters’ abilities, returns to Cromwell’s organizational excellence several times. She compares him to Simonides (“who invented the art of memory”), to a prototypical information-storing device under construction in Paris (“a memory machine”), and to an illustrated medieval breviary. While working as a hired soldier in Italy, Cromwell learned a “memory system,” a trick of joining events to mnemonic images: “Some of these images are flat, and you can walk on them. Some are clothed in skin and walk around a room. . . . He keeps them, in strict order, in the gallery of his mind’s eye.” The closest he comes to panic in Wolf Hall is while he watches his teenage son sort his papers:

What is Gregory doing? He is putting the documents into a stack. On what principle is he doing it? He can’t read them, they’re the wrong way up. He’s not filing them by subject. Is he filing them by date? For God’s sake, what is he doing?

Later, once his son is gone, Cromwell returns to his office and files this stack of papers correctly. There is a historical basis for this characterization; the bulk of the English archives for the decade of Cromwell’s influence are composed of his extensive papers, which were seized by the state when he was arrested for treason in 1540.

The eight years of Cromwell’s influence, from 1532 to 1540, coincided with Henry VIII’s divorce from his first wife and marriage to Anne Boleyn, the creation of the Church of England, the execution of Thomas More, the execution of Anne Boleyn, Henry’s marriage to Jane Seymour, the printing of the first English bible, Jane Seymour’s death in childbirth, and Henry’s marriage to Anne of Cleves. Mantel looks at these familiar events and finds neither romantic drama nor historical spectacle, but human effort and ingenuity. Behind Henry’s divorces she sees the thousands of hours of careful justification necessary to prove that Henry’s marriage to Katherine was invalid, that Anne Boleyn herself had not engaged in a previous, secret marriage, that the Roman Church had no authority over Henry’s decision; then, later, to reverse the decision and prove that Henry’s marriage to Anne had been invalid all along.

In telling the story of Henry VIII from this perspective, Mantel is inviting in several different groups of readers. Cromwell is the subject of at least two distinct conversations: one going on between historians and one between novelists, filmmakers, and the screenwriters of BBC costume dramas. Among the former group, there is a general agreement that administrative framework Cromwell put in place played a role in the creation of the modern English state. Geoffrey Elton, the historian who first advanced this theory claimed that Cromwell was “éminence grise of about 98 per cent” of the English commonwealth and the architect of the welfare state. Opposing views argue against the degree of Cromwell’s influence but do not challenge this essential premise. Even the recent biography Thomas Cromwell: The Rise and Fall of Henry VIII’s Most Notorious Minister (2007) by popular historian Robert Hutchinson argued that Cromwell’s notoriety rested precisely in the centralized government processes he instituted, which Hutchinson saw as responsible for turning Tudor England into “what we would now recognize as a totalitarian, Stalinist state.”

To fiction, however, Cromwell—whose movements are not well documented until he appeared in public view as a man in his late thirties—is a curious blank space. With the partial exception of Ford Madox Ford’s The Fifth Queen, Cromwell represents, at best, the cold and ambitious organ of impersonal authority responsible for putting Thomas More, Anne Boleyn and hundreds of Henry’s other opponents to trial; at worst, he is the actively malevolent “agent of Satan” portrayed in Robert Bolt’s 1960 play A Man For All Seasons.

Bridging the gap that separates these views, Mantel moves fluently between the two different sides of Cromwell’s character. Her protagonist embodies the idea, which Mantel seems to share, that the only way to face the manifold trauma her books describe in such detail is through sustained and deliberate action. Writing on Robespierre in the London Review of Books, Mantel calls this principle vertu: the English word “virtue” is insufficient she thinks, as it sounds “pallid and Catholic.” Vertu, on the contrary, is neither self-righteousness nor individual sanctity, but “an active force that puts the public good before private interest.”

Following Elton, Mantel finds Cromwell’s most important achievements in his efforts to give order and shape to the turbulent events taking place around him. As he writes Anne Boleyn’s indictment, Cromwell imagines that his role in history is to sort out the “entanglement of thighs and tongues” between Henry and Anne, “to take that mass of heaving flesh and smooth it on to white paper: as the body after the climax lies back on white linen.” She seems less convinced by the charges laid against Cromwell by opposing views. Asked in an interview about the morality of Cromwell’s execution of Anne Boleyn, she replied, “Oh no, she’d got to go.” But Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies both try to show the ways that Cromwell’s public actions are formed by the events of his own life and the narratives that he has created to explain his actions to himself. The books’ most powerful moments are the ones that try to capture the two faces of these events—the public exterior and the private interior—side by side.

Bring Up the Bodies ends with Anne Boleyn’s execution. Cromwell, who is orchestrating the scene, is in command of every detail: a scaffold is set up in an old tournament field and sprinkled with sawdust; two hundred reservists are called up to lead a procession of London dignitaries; a special executioner, with a sword instead of an axe, is ordered from Calais. When Anne kneels, her attendants wrap her skirts around her feet, so that her body, when it falls, won’t be exposed. The one oversight—there is no coffin—is quickly corrected by emptying out a chest of arrows.

Mantel describes the execution itself in two sentences: “There is a groan, one single sound from the whole crowd. Then a silence, and into that silence, a sharp sigh or a sound like a whistle through a keyhole: the body exsanguinates, and its flat little presence becomes a puddle of gore.” By the next line, she has moved on, and Cromwell is already listing the noblemen who refused to kneel and the ceremonial banners that need to be carried to the church.

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Aftermath and Prelude

2013-04-22T16:14:24Z

by Benjamin Kunkel

My days are probably least different from yours on occasions of special public horror: another gun massacre, a bombing on American soil, the deadly explosion of a fertilizer plant. And like nearly everyone else I was angry and upset all last week, if not always for universal reasons. On Monday morning I read testimony in the Times from one of the hunger strikers indefinitely detained, so far without trial, at Guantanamo Bay, about his painful force-feeding. A few hours later the Boston Marathon was bombed, most likely, it later emerged, by two brothers, one a permanent resident and the other an American citizen, of Chechen background. The images on TV were among the worst I’ve seen, and I didn’t even deliberately look, just glanced for a second in a bar. On Wednesday, the Senate defeated measures to mandate background checks for gun purchasers and restrict the size of bullet magazines for assault weapons, although gun violence kills about 32,000 Americans every year, a number an order of magnitude greater than the approximately 3,400 deaths in the US from terrorism since 1970. On Thursday, one of several terrible headlines in the Times read: “More Greek Children Are Going Hungry.” Also on Thursday I learned that the perfectly credentialed American economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff had drawn and over three years promoted a misleading causal inference from data they failed to release until last week: this was that a country’s high debt to GDP ratio tends to induce rather than reflect slow economic growth. Reinhart and Rogoff’s work has been basic to the intellectual armature of politicians promoting austerity in the US and the EU, Greece with its hungry children included. On Friday, I woke to find out that an American fertilizer plant had blown up, killing at least twelve people. Ammonium nitrate is highly explosive, and for this reason often used by terrorists in truck bombs. The plant in West, Texas had last been inspected for safety twenty-eight years ago. In 1977, about thirty-eight Occupational Safety and Health Administration inspectors were employed per million American workers; by 2007, about nineteen, or half as many. More than 4,500 American workers are killed on the job each year.

Of all these events, the bombing produced the most nearly universal reaction. Even so, solidarity went only so far. On Friday, with Boston in lockdown as law enforcement agents searched for the surviving suspect in Monday’s bombing, Nate Bell, an Arkansas state representative, tweeted: “I wonder how many Boston liberals spent the night cowering in their homes wishing they had an AR-15 with a hi-capacity magazine.” I was in no more sympathy with those words than Bell would be with my views. All week my natural human indignation at murder and maiming had been accompanied by anger over the generally less spectacular damage done by contemporary capitalism. My anger over the inequality capitalism causes, and the hunger, and the fatal deregulation, and the impairment of democracy, and the threat of ecological collapse, runs through nearly every one of my days, alongside a desire not too different from despair to see within my lifetime at least the beginnings of a different order. This anger, amounting at times to real hatred, together with my desire-cum-despair for something better, must have become associated in my mind with mass murder for a simple reason: I know these feelings will never precipitate me into political violence, but at the same time they’re the feelings of mine closest to an impulse to do widespread physical harm. So my worst emotions are mixed up, deeply, with my most humane ones. From the standpoint of any value of mine, the commission of slaughter would be worse than useless. Still, the attraction of violence, except for sadists, is the mirage of effective action, and I have seen that mirage shimmer in my mind’s eye. A similar illusion of efficacy belongs to most anything you or I might say about politics, our species, the planet, and the more so inside a defective democracy.

For more than four years I lived in Buenos Aires, where as it happens in 1994 a Jewish community center was bombed, probably by Iranian operatives, killing eighty-five people and injuring hundreds, and where the sidewalks of my neighborhood were inlaid here and there with ceramic memorials to Argentines, mainly young and leftwing, abducted and killed by the neoliberal junta of the late ’70s. I hated to see how the memorials were chipped, worn down, and sometimes made illegible by ordinary foot and bike traffic, and it occurred to me more than once that I or someone else should look into getting the ceramic plaques replaced by brass ones.

I didn’t expatriate myself for political reasons. But a part of my reluctance to come back to live in the US, as I did in December, was political estrangement from this country, something easier for me to deal with when I’m abroad.

I went home for Christmas to Colorado, and after my father picked me up at the Denver airport we drove past Aurora, where on July 20 of last year a gunman opened fire during a midnight screening of the latest terrorism-themed Batman movie, killing twelve people and wounding fifty-eight. (The next day I uselessly, glibly tweeted a line of Dickinson’s: “Good morning, midnight.”) Colorado is meanwhile in the grips, thanks to global warming, of a severe drought, and it seems that my memory of the landscapes I saw as a kid through the long blue twilights of winter afternoons may outlast the landscapes themselves, since persistent thirst is changing the vegetation. The ready availability, including to lunatics, of assault weapons with high-capacity magazines, and the burning of fossil fuels past the tolerance of the existing climate have to do, as everyone knows, with a congress largely populated by hirelings of the gun lobby and the oil companies. I could strangle a senator or two, if I was able. Except I never could.

Now I’m in New York City again, where I was also living during the confusion and horror of September 11, 2001, and where I spent more time than planned in the fall of 2011, partly because I was pleased by the advent of Occupy Wall Street. Here finally was a spectacle that wasn’t a violent one, and that conveyed something of what I believe. Then the mayor, a billionaire with a fortune gained through the provision of data to a thin stratum of financial professionals of little use to the rest of society, shut down the peaceful occupation of Zuccotti Park with riot police wielding truncheons, pepper spray, and handcuffs, tossing books and artwork into dumpsters. No such measures could be taken against the flood waters of Hurricane Sandy, bred on the warmed waters of the northern Atlantic, when they occupied lower Manhattan this past November.

Right now I’m spending most of my time, for what it’s worth, writing or meaning to write a book about a possible way out of fossil capitalism. I also read a fair amount, mostly history and social theory. But on certain days the news distracts me and then more of my hours go to consulting websites and following links and, for some kind of palliation I suppose, to reading or recalling bits of poetry. So it was across the five days after the bombing. I studied English at Harvard, just across the river from Boston, and, unrepresentative as that fact may be, I suspect my experience as I grow older in this society is becoming a common one: many places my life has passed through are becoming associated with flashes of horror or with drawn-out collapse, ecological and economic.

It’s a strange sensation, on the brink of midlife. I’m more than ever grateful to be alive, for the interest and pleasure I have in the people I know, in thinking about the world, in the prospect of doing good if politically unavailing work, and in little things like the sight last week of some just-bloomed forsythia. (My grandmother, in her dementia, was each spring in New Hampshire surprised repeatedly by the beautiful yellow blazes.) But whenever I raise my head from more intimate concerns there is the miscarriage of my society and civilization going on around me, robbing many people of what I still have to enjoy, and I find myself appalled enough at the gradual and sudden calamity that it seems to reveal hopes that I never knew I had, evident only in the dashing. These are hopes for this world “which is the world/ Of all of us,—the place where, in the end,/ We find our happiness, or not at all.”

Those lines come from Wordsworth, whose 1805 version of his book-length poem The Prelude I’ve nearly finished for the first time. I wish I’d read it years ago, but at least I’ll have done it once, when no long work in English has made me gladder for my native language. In the tenth book of thirteen, Wordsworth has returned to England from across the Channel, where, “enflamed with hope,” he had observed a sequence of the French Revolution and felt that “A spirit thoroughly faithful to itself,/ Unquenchable, unsleeping, undismayed,/ Was instinct among men, a stream/ That gathered up each petty straggling rill/ And vein of water, glad to be rolled on/ In safe obedience” toward a sort of oceanic universality of “equity and reason.” But then Wordsworth’s own country makes war against revolutionary France, and the reader is surprised, as the pastoral kindly poet himself seems to have been, by the antipatriotic malice this prompts in him. When French forces defeat British troops on the battlefield, “I rejoiced,/ Yes, afterwards, truth painful to record,/ Exulted in the triumph of my soul/ When Englishmen by thousands were o’erthrown.” He even sits in church among fellow Cumberlandshire congregants, listening to “prayers offered up” for his country’s army, “And, ’mid the simple worshippers perchance/ I only, like an uninvited guest/ Whom no one owned, sate silent—shall I add,/ Fed on the day of vengeance yet to come.”

Wordsworth, in other words, who as a child “with the breeze/ Had played, a green leaf on the blessed tree/ Of my beloved country,” has come in part to hate his country, and to have impulses of vengeance toward young Englishmen much like him except for their being soldiers. And then, at this knowledge, he feels hatred for the hatred bred in him, compounded with disgust at the French revolution’s turn toward terror and disgust at the counterrevolutionary alliance arrayed against it. It comes to seem, terribly, that the stream of contemporary events doesn’t at all lead into some ocean of peace and justice but deserves a different aquatic image, as if all history were “a reservoir of guilt/ And ignorance, filled up from age to age,/ That could no longer hold its loathsome charge,/ But that burst and spread in deluge through the land.” He consoles himself with the thought that even such a “disastrous period did not want/ Such sprinklings of all human excellence/ As were a joy to hear of.” But the consolation is small. Mass violence has contaminated his joy in either of the opposed countries that he loves, and twisted some of his deepest feelings, with their inclination toward beauty, into ugliness. It must have done something for him to write about all this, and it’s done something for me to read it. But what does it do, to read or write or speak about our grief, anger, and improbable stupid hopes?

In the moment an emotion is expressed or an event reported on, I don’t quite feel the emotion or the event; the names for things partially and temporarily replace their actuality. The need for this relief may explain the desperate quality of my and perhaps your online reading, and of much that is written online or said into TV cameras. Language in the utterance is some escape from what it says. But then the world that is not bits or syllables resumes its undeflected course.

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American Realness

2013-04-17T16:05:26Z

by Lizzie Feidelson

Image: Keith Hennessy's Turbulence (a dance about the economy). Photo by Ian Douglas.

This January was the fourth year of American Realness, a ten-day festival of experimental dance at the Abrons Art Center in Lower Manhattan. The festival caters to artists whose work is considered too provocative or cerebral for mainstream venues, and many, if not most, of the major downtown New York City dance artists have taken part. This year Trajal Harrell presented his vogue opus Judson Church is Ringing in Harlem (Made-to-Measure)/Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at The Judson Church (M2M). Jeanine Durning performed thirty minutes of nonstop speech in a piece called inging. There was also Neal Medlyn’s Wicked Clown Love, a dance inspired by Insane Clown Posse; Keith Hennessy’s “dance about the economy,” featuring a homemade trapeze; Tere O’Connor’s latest work, poem; and Faye Driscoll’s riveting duet You’re Me.

The festival coincides with the American Performing Arts Presenters conference, which takes place every January in New York. During APAP, thousands of industry professionals descend upon New York to shop for dances for their theaters’ coming season. The conference brings the commercial aspects of dance-making uncomfortably and unambiguously to the fore. Presenters are literally looking to purchase work, and the artists on display during the festival are—often desperately—trying to sell. The artists featured in American Realness are the ones who usually don’t get bought.

In a world as traditional as dance, it’s hard for a non-virtuosic performer to get as much mainstream traction as, say, a painter who doesn’t have technical training. It’s also true that conceptual dance work of the American Realness variety—witty, pop-inflected, anti-virtuosic, lowbrow, queer—can easily evoke a counterculturalism that feels like a familiar convention pose itself. The work of shock-artist Ann Liv Young, for example, has featured egregious karaoke and defecating onstage; this year at American Realness, Young sold pink cappuccinos and “free” therapy from a truck parked outside the theater. The collective AUNTS proposes a “model of producing dance/performance/parties” that “defies the regulation of institution, capitalism, and consumerism,” and sees little distinction between a dance performance and a dance party. Deliberately eschewing ideas of physical “skill” or rarified technical vocabulary, these are examples of work that can, from the outside, be ridiculed as stunt instead of art, a kind of “flouting of the rules” that at first glance seems to flout very little.

But American Realness is satisfying, and part of what makes it so is its undisguised acknowledgment of the sale; no one at Realness is pretending not to care that people are looking. The rawness of Realness is perhaps the perfect foil to the garish industry conference. “Realness” is a drag ball term for appearing to be something you are in fact not: one achieves “realness” by disguising oneself so well as someone of the opposite gender or social strata that the disguise becomes invisible. It is an apt metaphor for the way dance performances during APAP can feel: to sell a dance—or yourself—to out-of-town booking agents with conventional tastes in performance, choreographers must rise to the surface of an intensely anxious, financially disadvantaged artistic community by selling so hard and so well as to appear to be doing it effortlessly, appearing simply beautiful.

Instead, the first thing Trajal Harrell did before his 20 Looks piece at Realness was take the mic, stand before the audience with the house lights up, and apologize for the unvarnished nature of what we were about to see. Like an art student offering up a series of last-minute excuses before a critique, he admitted that the costumes to weren’t quite done. “This is supposed to be the ‘L’ size of my piece,” he said, referring to the fact that his multi-part opus can be “tailored” in size from XS-XL, depending on the space in which it’s performed. “This room is more . . . like . . . medium, though,” he said, smiling out at the theater. We were in the largest one the Abrons Art Center had.

When the house lights went down and spotlights came on, four men took the stage one by one to dance whirlwind, vogue-inflected solos to blaring indie pop. Each dancer took a turn sashaying across the stage in one of an assortment of upcycled garments. One wore a pair of pants slung chicly over his shoulders like a structured scarf. Another paraded forth with straightfaced aplomb, a wad of foam stuck into the crotch of his gym shorts like a high-couture strap-on. Harrell chanted, “Werk. . . werk . . . There’s an ICON in the house,” while his dancers’ fingers fumbled through costume changes in the aisles. According to the program, the piece was a mash-up of postmodern minimalism and 1980s Harlem vogue culture, with the plot of Antigone thrown in. When it came time to narrate the story, Harrell switched from drag ball emcee to a one-man chorus. From the front of the theater, he chanted “GREEK. TRAGEDY. REALNESS,” again and again into the pitch black.

American Realness differs from most showcases produced to attract tour bookings in that almost all productions are staged at full length, instead of in excerpt. Harrell’s piece was nearly two hours long. Keith Hennessy’s Turbulence (a dance about the economy) was also like a jam-band set—luxurious and patience-testing at the same time. The action was diffuse and constant: two women grappled with a large swath of gold sequined fabric covering their bodies and faces while other performers milled around, adjusting things, and watched. Hennessy climbed the trapeze dangling in the center of the room, then worked his way up from the trapeze through the maze of hanging lights in the ceiling and along the precarious ledge at the top of the ceiling to a corner where he crouched, shouting. A performer stopped to tell a story about an unpleasant incident, and others chimed in to give advice. The entire group—perhaps fifteen in all—held the corners of the giant gold cloth and let the light play over the sequins.

“Did we get through it all?” One performer asked another when the cloth had been tucked away. “Not sure,” the other performer replied. The audience waited while the group counted: yes, they had gone through every intended experience! But wait—one more song. One performer accompanied another singing a plaintive folk melody. Another took a seat in the audience and grinned at us. Then it was over.

Arguably every dance at American Realness is “a dance about the economy.” The first festival came together in response to a Huffington Post article by Kennedy Center president Michael Kaiser, called “Why I Worry About Modern Dance.” Kaiser complained that he saw no new crop of artists rising to replace the “golden age” choreographers of 20th century: Merce Cunningham, Jose Limon, Bill T. Jones, and Martha Graham. “Virtually every great modern dance company was founded over forty years ago,” he wrote. “Where are the current, not to mention next, generation of great modern dance companies to carry the torch?”

What Kaiser was mourning was, of course, the death of modern dance funding. The challenging work produced by the original Judson Church Theater collective—work by Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton, dancers seen as the last in the line of great "dance boom" artists like Cunningham and Graham—had coincided, luckily, with an increase in funding for dance by the National Endowment for the Arts in the early ’60s. The NEA gave unprecedented support for American dance companies to tour the country, and it was funding structures like these that helped make Trisha Brown and Merce Cunningham American icons. By 1998, two key programs from this era, the longstanding Choreographic Fellowship program and the Dance Touring Program, had been cut or severely dented.

The result is that few choreographers—regardless of their subject material—maintain full-fledged companies anymore. It used to be that companies of dancers stuck with the same choreographer for years, touring the country, developing a cohesive identity and a large repertory of accumulated works. The traditional notion of modern dance—the one Kaiser lamented—is bound up in the intimate connection between the choreographer and the permanent, devoted corps of dancers that executed (or in a sense were) the choreographer’s artistic vision. Choreographers today work alone, or with a variety of collaborators on distinct pieces of dance—more the way we’re used to seeing visual artists work.

Looking at the American Realness line-up, it’s easy to see that “experimental” choreographers might be characterized (you could even say marginalized) as “experimental” not because of what they make, but because of how they work. American Realness is not so much a fringe festival as a demand that major funding structures everywhere to stop ignoring their impact on the field. Solo performers and choreographers without companies constitute the face, not the periphery, of contemporary dance, and to pretend otherwise is to pretend that institutional politics, economics, and aesthetics are not dependent on one another.

Tere O’Connor’s poem was danced by several longtime collaborators, among them former Cunningham dancer Silas Riener (the Merce Cunningham Dance Company recently disbanded, as per Cunningham’s wishes, when the choreographer passed in 2009).[1] O’Connor’s dances are masterpieces of deft montage. Styles of dance morph quickly from formal Cunninghamesque jumping sequences to moments of uncanny theatricality: a symmetrical, traditionally virtuosic execution of rhythmic steps might devolve into a weird little scene, the dancers standing in a clump with their limbs articulated at strange angles, their faces staring with an almost impish deadpan.

And there was Faye Driscoll’s You’re Me. She and Aaron Mattocks groped and flung themselves at each other in a series of charged interactions—they scream, they pet, they flirt, they wail, they strut, with costume pieces, paint, food, and assorted props wrapping around and flying off their bodies like so many more facial expressions. It was about “chaos,” said the program note.

Miguel Gutierrez’s 2010 work Last Meadow, a sprawling opus based on the life of James Dean, is a characteristic example of what American Realness wants to showcase and achieve. Instead of being produced once or twice in New York and then sliding out of existence, Last Meadow—partly because of the promotion it received as part of American Realness—has toured nationally, receiving the kind of funding usually reserved for the repertory of more traditional dance companies. In Last Meadow, Gutierrez’s longtime collaborator, the technically flawless dancer Michelle Boulé, played James Dean, a little brown wig framing her delicate face. Last year she told the New York Times that Gutierrez “didn’t even finish asking [her] to do something” before she “knew what he wanted.” Boulé might be Gutierrez’s muse, but she is not his dancer, as she might have been forty years ago. Instead she is a member of “Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People,” an ad-hoc collective of Gutierrez’s past and present collaborators, whose members work with multiple choreographers; some of them are choreographers themselves.

This year, Gutierrez’s contribution to American Realness was an understated solo with accompaniment by the musician Jaime Fennelly, also known as Mind Over Mirrors. The piece was based on the pair’s memories of “taking refuge in the top story of a rundown Bushwick, Brooklyn warehouse” in 2001. It was not audacious or wild. Instead it felt soft, vulnerable, and timeless. There was no cavorting, no spectacle. Gutierrez wore jeans, a T-shirt, and fake eyelashes on one eye. The lashes looked perched, not pasted on, like a moth or bird. While Gutierrez performed—tripping, toppling, shuffling, and swatting the air, letting his exposed flank flop satisfyingly against the floor, emitting a wordless warble into the microphone—Boulé was there in the front row, thin arms crossed, looking on.

1. Lizzie Feidelson's essay on the Merce Cunningham legacy plan appears in Issue 16, "Double Bind." You can buy it here or subscribe.

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n+1 Research: Call for Participants

2013-04-16T20:41:16Z

by The Editors

The n+1 Research Collective is conducting a study on pornography, for which we’re seeking (completely anonymous) interview subjects. It’s equally helpful to us to speak with people who use porn, avoid it, or have never encountered it in their lives—so if you’re interested, we hope you’ll consider talking to us, or spreading the word to people who you think may want to participate.

We’re exploring what it means—if anything—that people now encounter sex on the internet at early ages. We’d like to hear from you about the change from a world where sexually explicit depictions were less accessible to one in which they are instantly available.

As a participant in the study, your name will always be kept confidential, seen only by a project administrator who does not see the interview transcripts and never attached to any data or responses you provide. We are currently seeking participants who live in the New York Metro area (or have lived there recently) and are 35 or older.

Interested? We hope so. Email nplusoneresearch@gmail.com if you can participate, and our administrator will arrange an anonymous online Gchat interview with one of our interviewers. We will provide you an anonymous Gmail account to write from. The interviews take approximately two to three hours. Most people really enjoy them.

(P.S. Know a friend who might be interested? Please spread the word. We hope eventually to publish a book based on our findings, including your (anonymous) thoughts and stories.)

Gratefully, n+1 Research Team

The Porn Era research team: Mark Greif, Kathleen Ross, Erin Sheehy, Nika Mavrody, Richard Beck, Christopher Glazek, Elizabeth Gumport

Administrator: Anne Schult (nplusoneresearch@gmail.com)

For privacy purposes, please let Anne know if you know any of the researchers. You’ll never be interviewed by an acquaintance, nor will your participation be known. Conversations are confidential, and your anonymity is guaranteed.

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NYPL Rally, April 18

2013-04-16T17:38:33Z

We received the following from the Committee to Save the New York Public Library, and encourage all New Yorkers to participate if they can in this rally. Also, if you haven't already, read Charles Petersen's article about the proposed library renovation from Issue 14.

The Committee to Save the New York Public Library will be participating in a rally this coming Thursday, April 18th on the steps of New York's City Hall. The Committee, Citizens Defending Libraries, and Comptroller John Liu will speak out against policies of New York City's public library systems that place the interests of real estate developers above the interests of library users.

If you live in New York City, we invite you to join us!

Noon, Thursday, April 18
City Hall Steps
Entrance on the east side of Broadway near Murray Street; arrive early to pass through security. Nearest subway stations are Brooklyn Bridge (4/5/6), City Hall (R), Park Place (2/3) and Chamber Street (A/C/E and 1).

The Committee is calling for a halt to the Central Library Plan (CLP), which, at enormous cost to the city and its taxpayers, would irreparably damage the 42nd Street Research Library—one of the world's great reference libraries and a city, state, and national historic landmark.

There has been widespread skepticism among library patrons, preservationists, and architecture critics about the wisdom, financial feasibility, and aesthetic quality of the plan. Underlying these concerns is the extraordinarily closed process through which the Library administration has made its decisions. Despite the fact that the 42nd Street building is owned by the City and is one of our most iconic structures, the plan was formulated with minimal public notification and no public input. The $150 million which the City has earmarked towards the project was awarded without any oversight by the City Council and with no public hearings. If alternatives have been seriously considered they have never been disclosed, and no cost-benefit analysis or detailed budget has ever been presented to the public.

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Episode 8: Arguable Direction

2013-04-16T15:44:14Z

by Elisa Wouk Almino, Eric Wen, Malcolm Donaldson, Moira Donegan

Download this episode.

The n+1 podcast returns with a new monthly show of stories, debates, live readings, performances, interviews, and more. This month's episode features articles from Issue 16: Double Bind, including conversations about cultural sociology with editors Marco Roth and Nikil Saval, Newtown with Rachel Basch, and drumming with Oneida's John Colpitts.

Produced and Hosted by Elisa Wouk Almino, Moira Donegan, and Eric Wen at WNSR: New School Radio.
Audio engineer: Malcolm Donaldson.
Music by Oneida, Delicate Steve, and J Dilla.
Original Music by The Westerlies featuring Andrew Mulherkar, Luke Sellick, Sammy Miller.

Subscribe to our podcast on iTunes.

Subscribe to the n+1 Podcast

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White Indians

2013-04-15T16:17:55Z

by The Editors

Image: Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle (d. Danny Leiner, US, 2004)

In a recent article on the lack of ethnic diversity on American television, the critic Emily Nussbaum paused from pondering the absence of blacks on TV — the usual complaint against homogeneity — to note the sudden ubiquity of South Asians. “Black and white are not the only colors of diversity,” she wrote, and listed roles accorded to desi actors in The Office, Parks and Recreation, Community, Smash, The Big Bang Theory, Whitney, and The Good Wife. Never mind that at least two thirds of these shows suck. The mottling by occasional brown faces of the otherwise creamy expanse of TV whiteness, like the smattering of freckles on Pippi Longstocking, should be a sign of character — and progress. Nussbaum understands that diversity isn’t quite the right word for this. “At times I’ve wondered if this isn’t a psychic workaround: is brown safer than black?”

Every South Asian reader knew the answer. When even whiteness is freighted in liberal circles with maudlin guilt, no color is safer than South Asian brown. No minority presence in the US is more reassuring, or less likely to get angry or acknowledge your antiblack racism. The South Asian is sometimes the soft-spoken but intense professional— the alert-eyed and firm-jawed Dr. Sanjay Gupta on CNN. But just as often the television South Asian echoes the gestures of the standard fawning coolie of yore: palms clasped together, head shaking from side to side, mumbling “sahib” through an apologetic smile crowned with an anachronistic mustache. Or she is a cartoon auntie flinging her sari over her shoulder as she hovers over a pot of steaming aloo methi, yelling to her son in Rushdiean patois: “Eat-na, why you no eat! Food is spoiling-goiling,” et cetera. Nussbaum didn’t mention that the show that for a while came after The Office in the NBC Thursday night lineup was called Outsourced. The show followed the comic travails of whites stranded in an Indian call center, but was chiefly humiliating because its South Asian actors had lined up eagerly, in possession of free will, to portray racist stereotypes. South Asians have done this proudly for years, chiefly in film: from the many who played monkey brain eaters in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom to Kal Penn as the repressed nerd in the Van Wilder movies, Dev Patel tomming through The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, and the guy who literally played a coolie in The Royal Tenenbaums. Such minstrel figures paved the way for and now coexist with the accentless, “American” desi nebbish who fills the minority quota on TV.

But if we blamed the goras[1] for their tacit racism, we’d only be going too easy on ourselves. The presence of desis on television isn’t just a sign of executives obliged to present diversity and doing it by stereotyping a docile minority. The South Asian presence on TV is also evidence of the enormous power of the South Asian diaspora — the most powerful and successful immigrant minority in America. No immigrant group in the US is so uniformly rich, so well placed in professional and executive ranks, so widely dispersed and integrated into wealthy white society. We have the Booker Prize on lock! Bengalis rule postcolonial studies. The motel business is mostly run by Gujaratis. American magazines, which largely count no blacks or East Asians on their staffs, always have at least one pliant South Asian. The most popular immigrant narratives of recent years have been tales of Indian migrants, and Jhumpa Lahiri must be the most successful American short-story writer of our time. The first minority governor of Louisiana since Reconstruction is an Indian, Piyush “Bobby” Jindal. He has recently been joined, in the ranks of brown Republicans, by another Indian governor, Nikki Haley. The decade-long chaos at Citibank was presided over by an Indian, Vikram Pandit, and as Vijay Prashad has noted, South Asians truly may be said to have reached the pinnacle of American success now that Galleon CEO Raj Rajaratnam has been convicted of the whitest of white-collar crimes, insider trading.

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All these facts, even the crimes, are sources of unctuous pride for South Asians, both in America and the mother countries. If no American minority but Jews is as powerful, surely no minority is as smug. Yet the unparalleled success of South Asian immigrants is largely the consequence of a famous peculiarity in subcontinental emigration: a quota system that tended to favor professionals has made the drain from South Asia (chiefly India) almost entirely brain. Both education and capital emigrated to America (though they frequently flew back home to visit); this has meant that the brown people who arrived here were not even very brown in their mother countries. They were often high-caste (if not upper-class) Hindus fluent in English. Unless they were Punjabis whose world had been scythed by Partition, they barely registered the passions and arguments of the independence struggle, knowing only the misery of the subcontinental poverty they had to escape. When they left India, the immigrants fled politics as well as joblessness. When they arrived in cold war–era America, they were prepared to play it safe.

India had the wind taken out of it in the early ’60s by a losing border war with China, setting off a long period of stagnation. Despite and perhaps in part because of this, it achieved impressive success abroad as a “spiritual” destination for American travelers. Allen Ginsberg trailblazed a path to India for the hippies, who came back to set in stone the cliché that India was “a land of contrasts.” Ravi Shankar brought the sitar and the frog-sounding glissandi of the tabla to pop, thanks to the otherwise useless George Harrison, while La Monte Young and Terry Riley translated the droning ragas of Indian music into classical minimalism. It seems only fair that a variety of hack gurus on tourist visas of their own came to dupe the naive in America for more money than they could in India. It was the first and last time that it was cool to be Indian in America, and it gave cover to thousands of business, professional, and educational migrants who benefited from this first “positive” image of brownness.

Desis began to enter the US en masse around the time of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, just as the racial conversation in the US was shifting away from racial equality and toward the disorders of black families and their “culture of poverty.” Since then, as Vijay Prashad has argued in two penetrating books about the diaspora, The Karma of Brown Folk and Uncle Swami: South Asians in America Today, South Asians have contributed to and benefited from the vibrant American tradition of antiblack racism. South Asians routinely are held up by elites (especially, self-servingly, newly crowned desi elites) as examples of how to succeed in America — in contrast to (the comparison is sometimes implied, but often explicit) blacks’ stagnation in their own insoluble pathologies. One doesn’t become the very model of a modern model minority simply by being good in the gaze of whites; one also has to be visibly bad to the “unmodel” minorities below.

The success of desi professionals became a key argument that some difficulty intrinsic to blacks was the cause of their failure. Years before Goan immigrant reactionary Dinesh D’Souza made his wildly successful documentary about Barack Obama’s dystopia, he asked, even more influentially, “Why can’t an African American be more like an Asian?” Around the same time, Jesse Helms, arch-segregationist senator from North Carolina, was invited to address the Indian American Forum of Political Education, which he gratified with the following panegyric:

Indian Americans represent the best and the brightest the United States has to offer. You go to the finest hospitals, you can go to the universities, you can go into business and there they are, people from India. You understand the free enterprise system far better than a lot of people who were born and raised in this country.

As Prashad points out, Helms was speaking recognizable code, suggesting that the achievements of Indian Americans are “evidence that racism poses no barrier to success.” Behind this signal lies another: that of the whiteness of the Indian. Helms’s racist bigotry posed no barrier to his love of people whom the British once referred to as “niggers.” Brown has enjoyed a surprisingly easy translation to white.

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W. E. B. Du Bois worried long ago about the loyalties of South Asians in the fight against imperialism, in a 1938 essay deploring India’s “temptation to stand apart from the darker peoples and seek her affinities among whites. She has long wished to regard herself as ‘Aryan,’ rather than ‘colored’ and to think of herself as much nearer physically and spiritually to Germany and England than to Africa, China or the South Seas.” Du Bois was reassured by Tagore that India stood with black struggles against colonialism and racism. Maybe it did, for a little while — but in a very different intellectual era, as Pankaj Mishra has shown in From the Ruins of Empire, when figures like Du Bois and Tagore conceived of pan-Asian and -African identities that they hoped would stabilize and give cultural power to nations emerging from colonialism. If the situation of the diaspora has changed since the demise of Third Worldism, the status of South Asia and India in particular has changed more recently and even more dramatically. India’s swift economic growth since its 1991 reforms not only brought it respect it previously enjoyed only among other developing nations, but allowed it to align with the greatest rogue, or unilateral, state powers. Casting off fraternity with subject nations, India turned toward America, of course, and also toward Israel and oil- and arms-rich Russia.

The cultural effects could be felt across the world. Bollywood, formerly the leading edge of third-world cinema, the one currency to survive the Sino-Soviet split, became, with the support of the Indian elite, a newly slick Hollywood craze. Indianness itself, for years a source of shame in the diaspora, became puffed with pride. Lahiri’s protagonist in her bestseller The Namesake, Nikhil “Gogol” Ganguly, takes a roots trip east and briefly swaps his white girlfriend for a mother-approved Indian. Less familiar to other kinds of white people, diaspora children in recent years have been subject to low-budget films like American Desi and ABCD (American-Born Confused Desi), coming-of-age stories in which deracinated teenage South Asians — never Muslim, usually male — learned to cast off their self-loathing and embrace Hinduism, arranged marriages, and bhangra dancing.

Behind the scenes, the Indian American Center for Political Awareness (IACPA) recruited these deracinated Indians who were “discovering their roots” and sent them to work for American congressmen, quietly pushing Indian issues into the light of the new world order. In 1993, two years after the first neoliberal Indian economic reforms, Congress formed an India caucus. It began with eight members and now has 180. A founding project of the Indian lobby was to push the US away from its cold war alliance with Pakistan and toward an India that was becoming astoundingly “business-friendly” in the ’90s and, after September 11, could be counted on to contribute to the United States’ campaign against Islamic peoples. India’s 1998 nuclear tests briefly alarmed the US (while earning a congratulatory note from Israel), but two years later President Clinton signaled a shift in American policy with a much-feted visit to India. One of the India lobby’s greatest victories came in 2005, when the US finally signed the nuclear energy deal India had been pushing for since the ’90s. Another great success has been to squelch any discussion among American elites of the occupation of Kashmir — which India regards as a “bilateral” issue (i.e., between India and Pakistan) rather than an ongoing international crime. India, land of Gandhi, is now the world’s largest arms importer, with Russia and Israel as top partners.

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We should be troubled by the success of desi politicians in the American South, home of the white-supremacist theocracy. (Both Jindal and Haley happen to be converts to Christianity.) The accession to power isn’t a sign of a Republican Party more hospitable to minorities; rather it’s a reflection of a minority for whom race is nothing but expediency. We will be ethnic when you want us to be, but we can slip right out of it when the blacks come to call. Hacks like Jindal and Haley have risen in the party through their brownness, which they disavow except when exploiting it. No one lives in a postracial America, but we desis have mostly enjoyed a postbrown existence that looks like one; “brown” solidarity has often amounted to desi professionals forming business associations to better exploit workers.

And yet, the desi figure is becoming more equivocal than the white Indians of Southern politics might suggest. A happier image for the future is the desi stoner Kumar of the Harold and Kumar films, who may be the single best role model for generations of brown people otherwise condemned to going pre-med. Kumar, who uses his textbooks to roll joints, suggests the dual character of desi immigration. For the standard idea of the South Asian professional has been complicated in the past two decades by new waves of immigrants, many from Bangladesh and Pakistan, who own grocery stores, work at gas stations, and drive cabs. These new immigrants appear to have caused a shift in the politics of South-Asian Americans. After voting by slim margins for Democratic candidates in previous elections, they voted overwhelmingly for Obama in 2008 and 2012. (The President, addressing an audience of Indian Americans in San Francisco, talked about his friendships with South Asians and dubbed himself an honorary desi who knew how to make a decent dal.) And the hardening of Republican anti-immigration sentiment has meant the GOP has lost a putatively natural constituency for the near future. The white Indians who went into the halls of racist power currently enjoy prominence; but the future may yet hinge on how many more of us prefer to go to White Castle.

1. An earlier version of this article misspelled goras as ghoras. The former means 'whites,' the latter, uh, 'horses.' We regret the error.

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Medvedev's It's No Good Tour, April 18–25

2013-04-12T21:11:21Z

PLEASE HELP WELCOME KIRILL MEDVEDEV DURING HIS FIRST TOUR OF THE US.

DATES

Wednesday, April 17, 4:15 PM. Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT. Fisk Hall. (With Keith Gessen.)

Thursday, April 18, 4:15 PM. Harvard, Cambridge, MA. CGIS S-354, 1730 Cambridge Street. (With KG and Bela Shayevich.)

Friday, April 19, 5:30 PM. University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA. Fisher-Bennett Hall, Rm. 401. (With KG and Bela Shayevich.)

Saturday, April 20, 7 PM. Book Court, Brooklyn, NY. Reading and concert and launch. (With KG, Mark Krotov, and Bela Shayevich.)

Sunday, April 21, 2 PM. New School, New York, NY. Screening of Winter, Go Away! with director Anna Moiseenko, followed by discussion with Moiseenko and Medvedev. D1009 screening room at 6 East 16th Street on the 10th floor. (Free and open to the public.)

Monday, April 22, 8 PM. Poetry Project, New York, NY. Reading of Underground Russian Poetry from Vvedensky to Medvedev. More here.

Tuesday, April 23, 6 PM. Yale, New Haven, CT. Room 106 at 212 York St. (With KG.)

Wednesday, April 24, 12 PM. Columbia, Harriman Institute’s Marshall D. Shulman Seminar Room, located at 420 West 118th Street @ Amsterdam Ave., 12th Floor, Room 1219. (With KG.)

Wednesday, April 24, 7 PM. Brooklyn Public Library (Grand Army Plaza), Brooklyn, NY. Readings with UDP authors Lawrence Giffin and Kim Rosenfield.

Thursday, April 25, 4:30 PM. Colgate University, Hamilton, NY. 27 Persson Hall. (With KG.)

All of these events are free and open to the public.

For more on Medvedev, see here, here, and here. To buy the book, please go here or to your neighborhood bookstore.

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On Margaret Thatcher

2013-04-12T16:00:00Z

by Sally Potter

Image: Thatcher and Queen Elizabeth at the Commonwealth Conference, Zambia, 1979.

Margaret Thatcher was a product of class. She came from a working-class background of shoemakers until her father "rose" through the merciless English class system to become a grocer. In England to be "a grocer's daughter," as she was often sneeringly called, means being lower-middle class. That is someone whose family has dedicated its energies to not being working class but is not yet middle class and certainly not aristocratic or owning class.

This engine of class anxiety powered Margaret Thatcher onto a trajectory that surprised the mostly posh Tory elite. While almost none of them voted her into power, they soon realized what they had. A combination of chance conditions had created a woman who fulfilled a number of needs crucial to revitalize a decaying and demoralized right wing. Importantly, she didn't appear to care what anyone thought of her. This personal armor was necessary for her to have survived politically. If she "cared" that people assumed her too weak, hysterical, high-pitched, or generally female to be a politician, she couldn't have opened her mouth.

This apparent imperviousness meant she was prepared to say in public what the Tory grandees said in private. This woman could front them up and they could appear moderate behind her. She could do the dirty work of the owning classes as she struggled to pass as one of them. At the same time she could use working-class credibility if she needed to, and therefore appear to support a culture of individual meritocracy. The cult of ownership reached its apotheosis in the selling off of "council" housing. To own is to exist. To rent is a sign of failure. The ethos of individual achievement led to the notoriety of her (out of context) quote, "There is no such thing as society."

Her class anxiety, so manifest in the painful eradication of her Lincolnshire accent, led to a forced, fake elocution, a voice that grated or soothed depending on what you were listening for. The photographs of Margaret Thatcher meeting the Queen are telling: she looks like a photocopy of the monarch, but badly printed. The anxiety blurs the picture. The cracks show. Both are figureheads but only one is the real thing. Nevertheless she was Prime Minister. She had the top job. How did a woman achieve the feat of leadership of a party dominated by and serving the interests of owning-class men?

The policies she espoused suited their purpose better than they could have dreamed, but so did the personal style: a bossy, middle-aged woman, not too motherly, dedicated to a cause beyond her own personal life. These were men who for the most part as boys were wrenched from their homes and sent to boarding school. By and large the women who had raised them most intimately were nannies from "respectable" working-class backgrounds who put their charges' needs ahead of their own families. At boarding school these women were replaced by matrons and housemistresses—disciplinarians, remote and authoritative, yet knowing the secrets and the vulnerabilities of their charges. Margaret Thatcher was perfectly cast in the role of ultimate incarnation of this succession of females in their lives, and that must be part of the explanation of her apparent power over the posh men in public life. But just as nannies could eventually be cast off at will, so could Margaret Thatcher if she stepped out of line, which she did in her third term.

It was her policies that incited rage in my friends and me, as young women growing up in the '80s in the shadow of her power. Humiliating the miners, selling off the housing stock, making people get excited about owning shares in basic amenities such as gas and electricity by privatizing them, stirring up sentimental patriotism, starting the trend of vilification of the poor, damning the unemployed as "lazy"—one catastrophic change rolled out after another. In the name of "saving" Britain from decline it seemed to us that she was destroying it.

But I remember one day standing staring at a poster in a shop window. The poster was designed by a left-wing group and showed Margaret Thatcher hanging from a noose with the heading "Kill the Bitch." This wasn't unusual, and has been echoed in the days after her death by reports of people chanting "Ding dong, the witch is dead," gleefully quoting the song from The Wizard of Oz. This has the appearance of innocent irony. But the eagerness to apply rhetoric and imagery akin to lynching and witch-burning—demonizing her as a woman and evoking ancient hatred of female power in any form, whether spiritual, medical, or political—was and is impossible to get enthusiastic about. Why this conflation of the person and her policies? Why was her conservatism perceived as evil rather than destructive, demonic rather than politically catastrophic?

It was in this confusing climate that I discovered it was possible to contain at least two attitudes simultaneously: on the one hand, revulsion toward and criticism of her ideas, the policies of greed, selfishness, brutal colonialism and militarism, and, on the other hand, a grudging admiration of her ability to gate-crash her way to power as a female, continuously enduring personal attacks—the endless references to her hair, her handbag, her voice, even the angle of her head.

Her bewilderment at the betrayal when it came from within her party—however hard she had worked, however little sleep she could endure, and even though she had lasted longer than any other Prime Minister in the 20th century—showed the shaky ground she had unknowingly stood on. She had stepped out of line and become "reckless"—in other words, was following her policies to their logical conclusion. The hated "poll tax" she introduced was shamelessly discriminatory against the poor and led to violent riots. Her blustery anti-European rants became embarrassing and her relationship with her always all-male cabinet was openly dictatorial. She was no longer an acceptable mouthpiece. She had to go.

Despite this political decapitation, it's ironic and distressing that the right wing has produced a female leader, now spoken of respectfully, even reverentially, by its leaders, while the left limps toward gender equality in politics and launches its criticisms of Margaret Thatcher in a rhetoric borrowed from the Inquisition. But above all we are left with a cocktail of derision at class and female mobility, a trajectory in her case barely disguised by stiff hairspray and elocution lessons. It is telling that Margaret Thatcher's presence could be evoked by Martin Amis on BBC TV's Newsnight the day after her death as "a whiff of Chanel mixed with the occasional refreshing weep" and with a quote from Mitterrand, who said she had the mouth of Monroe but the eyes of Caligula. The female body must be punished, it seems, for transgressions from eternal second place, and the girl from the working classes must never be allowed to forget that her origins still show like lipstick on her teeth.

A funeral display of pomp, ceremony, and grief, planned as if for royalty, reeking of hypocrisy on the part of those that brought her down and deflecting from a far more serious reality, will prove as divisive in its effect as the policies she espoused. For her greatest legacy was to eviscerate the Labour party, deflate any meaningful opposition and make all subsequent British parliamentary politics a soup of sameness. The myth of solidity of the middle class took hold in the popular imagination and everyone became afraid to appear to be anything else. Freedom and rampant self-interest became fatally confused. Principle, conviction, and belief lost their currency as words that meant anything dependable. And the woman herself became myth: a collective fiction, an exception. The door to real female power closed resoundingly behind her.

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Save Cooper Union

2013-04-10T16:32:45Z

by Sangamithra Iyer

Image: Cooper Union occupation, December 2012. From thepeoplesrecord.com.

On November 17, 2011, at a student rally in Union Square organized by Occupy Wall Street, a young woman’s words echoed through the crowd via the people’s microphone: “Education should be as free as air and water.”

The woman was an art student at Cooper Union, and the words she spoke were not her own, but have been attributed to industrialist and inventor Peter Cooper. The rally came just a few weeks after Dr. Jamshed Bharucha, who became president of Cooper Union in July 2011, revealed the grim financial condition of the school and suggested that the historically tuition-free institution could no longer be free. “I’m not saying I want to charge tuition,” Bharucha said at a subsequent meeting in his office with alumni. “I’m saying the institution is going down. We have to have all options on the table and hopefully this is only the last resort.”

Cooper Union is currently only one of a handful of schools that offer tuition-free education to all enrolled students. Among them are Webb Institute in Long Island, Deep Springs College in California, and military academies such as West Point. Berea College in Kentucky accepts only low-income students, offering them tuition-free education in exchange for a labor requirement. Olin College, which was founded in 1997 as a free engineering school, switched from offering full tuition to half tuition after suffering endowment losses during the recession. But it wasn’t long ago that free education was within reach at some of the nation’s best public universities. The City University of New York, once called the Free Academy, only started charging tuition in the 1970s. Several decades ago, state residents could attend the University of California for free.

In an era in which air and water have become increasingly commoditized, education at Cooper Union until now has been spared the fate of the University of California. This small art, architecture, and engineering college, with a student body of fewer than one thousand students, is dealing not only with a financial crisis but also an existential one. What is playing out at this East Village institution speaks both to the national debate about debt, labor, and the affordability of higher education and to Cooper Union’s history, which in its early years was so closely tied to the desires of the nation.

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For more than 150 years, Cooper Union has been a symbol of a certain American dream. Founder Peter Cooper himself seemed to come right out of one of Horatio Alger’s tales. Born during the Washington Administration, in 1791, he rose through a series of craftsman jobs, with almost no formal education, to acquire wealth through innovation. His inventions included the first gelatin dessert, the structural I-beam, and perhaps most notably, the first steam locomotive to be used on a common carrier railroad. Cooper also devoted decades to public service, becoming a New York City alderman, supporting the antislavery and Native American reform movements, and at 85 serving as the presidential nominee of the populist Greenback Party. He became one of the wealthiest men in New York, but unlike his robber-baron contemporaries, Cooper believed that wealth was a public trust.

Perhaps his greatest legacy and act of philanthropy was the founding of an educational institution for the working classes, free of charge, which since opening its doors in 1859 has professed not to discriminate by race, gender, class, or creed. The original charter called for free instruction at night in the sciences, a day school of design for “respectable” females, a free reading room, and free public lectures. When funds became available, a polytechnic school was to be created. Cooper also hoped to establish “The Associates of Cooper Union,” modeled after the Society of Arts in London. Its reach was to be vast and inclusive, including alumni, professional societies, members of the press, public school teachers, and other civil servants.

Cooper was influenced by the free École Polytechnique in Paris, which a friend had described to him. “What interested me most deeply was the fact that hundreds of young men were there from all parts of France, living on a bare crust of bread a day to get the benefits of those lectures.” That deep desire and want of education was something Cooper empathized with, having had no access to education as a young man. “It was this feeling which led me to provide an institution where a course of instruction would be open and free to all who felt a want of scientific knowledge, as applicable to any of the useful purposes of life,” Cooper said in his 1864 commencement address.

From the outset, Cooper Union opened its doors to debate. The basement of the Foundation Building housed the Great Hall auditorium, where Abraham Lincoln delivered his “Right Makes Might” speech challenging Stephen Douglas in 1860, and started out on the road to the White House. During the following years, The Great Hall provided a space for debating, rallying, and organizing the abolition, suffrage, labor, and Native American reform movements. Fredrick Douglass spoke there in 1863. Susan B. Anthony had an office at the school. PJ McGuire and Samuel Gompers met taking night classes at Cooper Union and went on to start the American Federation of Labor. Cooper welcomed Oglala Sioux Chief Red Cloud when Red Cloud addressed the Great Hall in 1870. The NAACP and the Red Cross were chartered and convened their first meetings at Cooper Union.

When the school opened, women could attend either the Female School of Art during the day or the coeducational Free Night School of Science. Women who attended night classes during Cooper Union’s first decades had backgrounds that ranged from wealthy to working class. The noted exception to Cooper Union’s policy of free instruction occurred was the School of Art, run by a Ladies Advisory Council who had overseen the New York School of Design before it was absorbed by Cooper Union. These “benevolent and enlightened ladies” pleaded with the Cooper trustees to make an allowance for some paying pupils, who would be called “amateur students.” According the school’s first annual report, the trustees “were at first opposed to this deviation” but agreed on the condition that the number of amateurs be limited so as not to exclude the industrial pupils. These amateurs paid between one and two dollars a week for instruction in drawing, pastel, watercolor, or oil painting until the 1880s, when they disappeared from mention in annual reports. Discussion of the amateur class was removed from Cooper Union’s bylaws during their next revision in 1911.

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”The dealers in money have always been the dangerous class,” Cooper wrote in the last year of his life. “There may, at some future day, be a whirlwind precipitated upon the moneyed men of this country.” In his unpublished autobiography, Cooper recounts his frustrations with the bankers who controlled Congress and were creating a national debt. They had the power to control the volume of currency, issue credit, and charge unfairly high interest rates. In the spirit of Cooper’s beliefs, the original Cooper Union charter stated that the trustees should never mortgage the property or go into debt for more than $5,000 a year (except in anticipation of rents and revenues), and that they would be held personally liable for any deficit. In his turn-of-the century biography, Rossiter Raymond notes that Cooper claimed to pay all his debts every Saturday night, tracing “that horror of debt” to the time of debtors’ prisons.

How was Cooper’s vision sustained after his death? How did his school maintain its policy of free education? During its first four decades, Cooper Union was largely supported by Cooper and his family, and those years were not without struggle. To supplement gifts and donations, part of the Foundation Building was rented out to commercial tenants. Cooper and his son-in-law Abram Hewitt had asked Columbia University “with its large and growing revenues” and the Board of Education, which controlled the Free Academy, for support, but neither was willing to offer it.

In 1902 Andrew Carnegie, who had previously described himself as a “humble follower of Peter Cooper,” made a $600,000 gift to Cooper Union, one that was matched by Cooper’s heirs, who donated a property on Lexington Avenue. These gifts ensured Cooper Union’s endowment and allowed it to build the polytechnical school called for in the original charter and stop renting out part of the building to commercial tenants. The “Vanderbilt flats,” as the property was then called, now sits beneath the Chrysler Building. The school receives rent and the equivalent of property taxes from this piece of real estate, which in turn secured Cooper Union’s ability to provide full tuition scholarships.

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When asked how I went to school for free, I’d often point to the Manhattan skyline and say the Chrysler Building funded my education. I also often said that I came to Cooper Union because it was free, but that wasn’t the reason I stayed.

During my first year, which began in 1995, I lived in the dorms, at 29 Third Avenue. On the ground floor was St. Mark’s Bookshop, a tenant of the college. For the next three years, I shared a one-bedroom apartment with three other girls on Fourth Avenue. I slept in a tiny storage space that was six feet wide by seven feet long by four feet high. It was big enough to fit a mattress and a box spring and had a platform where I could put my computer. I sat on the edge of my mattress and worked on problem sets by hand or tinkered with Excel spreadsheets until the wee hours of the morning, usually on the phone with one of my classmates, figuring things out together. Sometimes we’d be working on different projects, and we’d stay on the phone together, in silence, comforted by the fact that we were not alone.

Cooper Union was a lesson in humility, perseverance, and resourcefulness. One of the things I deeply valued about it was its diversity. Many of my classmates were immigrants or first-generation Americans like me. Cooper was a place where we could celebrate our own and one another’s cultures, and every year, we put on an annual culture show in the Great Hall. I had the honor of dancing bhangra and dandia ras on that famous stage and also participated in a Filipino candle dance and Chinese fashion show.

When I graduated from Cooper, in 1999, I received a scholarship for a master’s program in geotechnical engineering at UC Berkeley. That summer, a major earthquake devastated Turkey. The first day of classes, the first thing one professor said was that Turkey smelled “like 40,000 dead people” and that “engineers who know that smell do their work a lot differently than those who don’t.” It was this sense of social responsibility that led me to pursue engineering, but also to leave it from time to time. A Cooper education freed me from debt, and allowed me the freedom to pursue purpose, not profit-driven endeavors. Its Union, for me, not only united the arts and the sciences but also was about making connections between the technical, the political, and the social.

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During the decade after I left Cooper Union, as its operating expenses continued to rise, its future became increasingly uncertain. When George Campbell Jr., took over as president in 2000, he undertook a major development plan that was intended to increase revenue and modernize the campus. The proposal, which was approved by the Board of Trustees, was to demolish the engineering building at 51 Astor Place and replace it with a large commercial tower. The Hewitt Building, where art classes were held, would also be destroyed. It would be replaced with a taller structure with more modern facilities, where academic programs would be consolidated under one roof.

This “general, large-scale development” plan required approval from the Department of City Planning and was subject to a public review process. In an Environmental Impact Statement, the school claimed the new plan was necessary to “contend with two challenges: to continue funding the full-tuition scholarships for all students and generate the necessary resources to be a leader in its degree programs.” This argument didn’t persuade East Village residents, who loudly protested the proposed changes to their neighborhood, but in the end the city planning commission granted conditional approvals to Cooper Union. A New York Times article in 2002 noted that “the commissioners said the public good that Cooper Union does by offering free education for its students—most of them New Yorkers—outweighed the impact on the community.”

Even after the land use was approved, the school had more hurdles to overcome. After it failed to meet its fundraising goals for the construction of the New Academic Building in 2006, Cooper Union submitted a petition to the New York State Supreme Court seeking permission “to use the Chrysler Building as security for the loan of up to $175 million,” releasing it from the restrictions of the 1902 deed. The school argued to the Supreme Court, as it had to the City Planning Commission, that the development plan was essential to maintain the school’s standing and financial well-being as a tuition-free institution.

The plans for the new building divided the Cooper community. Faculty members questioned the need for building and pleaded that the school make do with existing spaces. One letter from an engineering professor to President Campbell in 2006 noted the “great deal of discontent amongst the engineering faculty. At a faculty meeting on 5/18 the engineering faculty roundly rejected the new building by a vote of 16–6 in a closed ballot.”

Nevertheless, the New York Supreme Court granted Cooper Union’s request and construction began. A 2009 Wall Street Journal article lauded Cooper Union for being able to build its green LEED Platinum certified New Academic Building on 41 Cooper Square while other colleges were being forced by the economic crisis to halt their campus expansions. Newspapers reporting on Campbell’s retirement in 2011 noted that he grew the endowment, balanced the budget, and brought fiscal stability to the college.

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So it came as huge shock to alumni and students when Bharucha announced in October 2011 that with an annual deficit of $16 million and an unrestricted endowment of $45 million, the school’s available funds were on the verge of depletion. Just a few weeks before, St. Mark’s Bookshop had announced that Cooper Union was raising its rent and launched a massively popular petition to save the store, which led to Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer negotiating a rent reduction. There was no mention of the fact that Cooper Union itself was in crisis.

What had happened? It appeared that Cooper Union’s investment portfolio had not been immune to the crash of the financial markets. As the trustees subsequently explained, “projections made in 2008 conservatively anticipated a 2009 return of $6 million but instead our portfolio suffered a loss in that year of $22 million.” Meanwhile, the goal to reduce operating expenses by 10 percent by 2011 had never been achieved, and the college was paying $10 million a year of the $175 million loan taken out from Metropolitan Life. One can only imagine what Peter Cooper would think of the debt the school currently holds.

The plan proposed by President Campbell was supposed to ensure Cooper Union’s ability to grant full scholarships, and was approved based on Cooper Union’s reputation as a provider of free education. Ten years later, that plan appears to have jeopardized the full scholarship policy it was put in place to secure. (The board of trustees has argued otherwise: “It is also important to state that 41 Cooper Square was not the cause of the current financial dilemma. Its construction relieved Cooper Union of the costs that would have had to be incurred to renovate the old engineering building and the Hewitt Building to make them acceptable sites for a 21st-century education and meet accreditation standards.”)

If tuition is implemented, some fear that the Chrysler Building’s tax equivalency payments to the school might face a serious challenge. There have been several legal cases questioning a private college’s receipt of property taxes, but the courts have consistently sided with Cooper Union and its service to the public good. By seeking new revenues from tuition, the school could threaten its largest and only reliable source of funding.

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In November 2011, the Great Hall once again opened its doors to debate. Speaking to a nearly full auditorium about the college’s financial crisis, board chair Mark Epstein opened by saying there was no culprit, that “the problem is a systemic deficit.” The tuition model had been “on the table for twenty years” but only now brought “out of the board room.” Later in the evening, when pressed about the cause of this crisis, he did place blame. “If we have to go to the tuition model I would blame the alumni, 80 percent of whom do not donate to the school,” Epstein, himself an alumnus, said. “We made an investment in a lot of students that are now alumni, and only 20 percent of them donate back to the school, so I think that that’s a failed investment as far as that’s concerned for development.”

In a gesture of transparency, Bharucha offered to meet with small groups of students, faculty, and alumni to discuss this situation further. In December 2011, I joined a few other engineering alumni in his office on the seventh floor of the Foundation Building. Bharucha, formerly provost at Tufts, came to Cooper Union with his own background in art and science: he’s a violinist and neuroscientist. He sat at the head of the table, sketching its rectangular shape on his notepad. He wrote down our names, labeling where each of us were located. Bharucha showed us a drawdown graph that charted Cooper Union’s unrestricted endowment over time, under different market scenarios. He traced the lines until they hit the x-axis, between two and three years.

Bharucha reminded us that the financial vulnerability of the institution was not a recent phenomenon. “Financial troubles existed since day one,” he said. From 1859 to 1926, “there were thirty-five deficit years.” Later he referenced an article in the alumni magazine from 1971 that mentioned the possibility of phasing out the school of engineering or instituting tuition. Neither of those things happened. One of the alumni noted that this was around the time that Cooper Union sold Green Camp, a property it had acquired in Ringwood, New Jersey, which served as a country retreat for its students. (It was also where the National Society of Women Engineers was founded.) In the past, financial problems were solved by selling off assets, but Bharucha said there are no more assets to sell, and he is reluctant to shut programs down.

Bharucha said he hopes to have a sustainable financial model in place by 2018, the year the principal payment on the loan will kick in. But 2018 will also bring some relief. The legal document that negotiated the mortgage on the lease of the Chrysler Building states that the lease payments will increase to $32.5 million in 2018, $41 million in 2028, and $55 million in 2031. Bharucha argues that 2018 won’t bring enough relief to cover the rising cost of education. In the nearer term, Cooper Union could deplete its available funds by 2015.

I asked President Bharucha to what extent the tuition model has been developed. “On the question of how much tuition would be charged, how many would have to pay, and how much of it they would have to pay, we’ve hired a consultant,” Bharucha told me. “It’s a specialty now. It’s called enrollment management. We’ve hired one of the top enrollment management firms. They will do the market research.”

He reiterated that “any student that merits a Cooper Union education should not be denied one because of lack of affordability.” I asked if the phrase “for those who can afford to pay,” had been defined, to which he responded, “No it hasn’t been defined. It is a consideration. It has to be costed out.”

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While Bharucha is not responsible for the financial woes he inherited, he is the creator of a new narrative for the school, one that supports a tuition-based model. In speeches and meetings over the past year, Bharucha has spoken about “reinventing” Cooper Union. A crucial part of this reinvention is replacing the founding principle of free education with a new commitment to “accessible” education. “Access,” Bharucha has said, means “enabling students of merit to benefit from a fine education that would otherwise be out of reach. We must always have this as a priority, regardless of how we solve our financial challenges.” References to tuition-free education are slowly being edited out of the administration's language; when free education is mentioned, it is described as a “cherished aspect” rather than a core value of the school.

As students looked to Peter Cooper’s words to support their case against tuition, President Bharucha—in speeches, radio interviews, and meetings with alumni and stakeholders—invoked Cooper to support another argument. Bharucha took these opportunities to bring up the small fraction of “amateur” students at the women’s school of design who paid for their classes. In a speech in the fall of 2011, he stated, “It is important to note that in the early years, approximately the first forty years, tuition was charged at Cooper Union. It wasn’t until 1902, when Andrew Carnegie made a large gift to the institution, that a tuition-free education was granted to students.”

Bharucha looks to the amateurs as a sort of precedent, a justification for a tuition model. But the context and duration of the amateur program are misrepresented in Bharucha’s narrative. Paying students did not attend the school for the four decades, as Bharucha has repeatedly said; their presence can only be traced until the late 1880s. And the amateur program was not the norm at the school. It was clearly noted as an exception from the rule that instruction be “entirely gratuitous.” Attendance wasn’t mandatory for the amateur students, and they weren’t held to the same standards as the industrial pupils, who attended for free. The contemporary equivalent of an amateur class would not be a tuition-based model for undergraduate education, with some students funding the education of others, as Bharucha suggests. Instead the amateur class most resembles Cooper Union’s current fee-based continuing education programs (which themselves may be viewed as a deviation from the original mandate to provide free night instruction).

“There is a very fundamental framing conflict between the internal narrative of the institution and where the country is, for wanting those with means to contribute more so that others can have opportunity,” Bharucha said. He has often appropriated the language of the Occupy movement to suggest that Cooper students, who largely come from working and middle-class backgrounds, are the 1 percent. The administration has argued that charging some students to fund others would somehow level the field. Others argue that Cooper’s meritocracy is what ensures equal ground. They fear that if tuition is implemented, and the school is reliant on a certain amount of revenue from tuition, it will then become dependent on a certain percentage of its students being able to pay.

At a community forum in December 2011, Sam Messer, an assistant dean at the Yale School of Art and a Cooper alumnus, said, “There’s a lot of talk about the idea of tuition, and if you just say it as a sound bite it does seem fair: that the rich should pay their way." But “what happens if you don’t have qualified students at that level? Then you have, in a sense, amateurs,” meaning that admissions to the school at large would no longer be entirely merit-based.

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Beginning in December 2011, the newly formed grassroots coalition Friends of Cooper Union (FOCU), composed of alumni, students, faculty, and staff, met to generate its own solutions to Cooper’s crisis. The result was a document, “The Way Forward,” released in April 2012, that imagined a future without tuition and demanded more transparency and community engagement from the administration. FOCU later produced a ten-point financial plan, which it presented as a set of reasonable measures to start cutting costs and develop more effective fundraising based on the school’s mission. “The only radical idea in it is Peter Cooper’s,” Kerry Carnahan, an alumna and contributor to the document, said.

Bharucha appointed his own expense reduction and revenue task forces, and although their reports were not complete, he preempted “The Way Forward” by announcing last April that the school would preserve free undergraduate education for at least two more years, as it explored tuition-based graduate, online, and continuing education programs. This has been called the “hybrid” tuition model, and even the revenue task force report went on to note that it has considerable risks, would require an initial investment, and would not see returns for several years.

In late April 2012, coinciding with the publication of “The Way Forward,” I participated in a community summit organized by FOCU. Litia Perta, an adjunct professor who has taught on and off at Cooper Union since 2006, opened up the discussion by saying that she’s currently on unemployment and collects more money—“kind of by a lot”—than she has as an adjunct, and that while on unemployment she had the additional benefit of being able to defer her own student loan payments. “I could not afford to teach here this semester,” she said. “I think that seems really relevant.”

Perta made this statement on the same stage that launched the modern American labor movement. She also noted that about 70 percent of classes at Cooper Union are taught by adjuncts with no job security, health insurance, or other benefits. Nationally, about 75 percent of college classes are taught by adjuncts in similar situations today. Cooper was founded to educate the working classes, and now highly educated faculty members are among its working class.

While there is a lot of discussion at Cooper Union of how to increase revenue streams, Perta posed the question, How much does it actually cost to educate someone? “I’m one of the teachers here and I don’t make no money, and neither is it coming to any of the tenured faculty members,” she said. Full professor Toby Cumberbatch also wanted an answer to this question. “I understand we are spending about $60 million a year—that is $60,000 a year per student.” He noted that the budget of the engineering school, which educates 50 percent of the college’s students, was only $6 million. Where is the money going?

Richard Stock, professor of chemical engineering and head of the faculty labor union, noted at a FOCU summit in December 2011 that operating expenses more than doubled between 1995 and 2010, going from $28 million to $68 million. Stock said that a large part of that increase could be attributed to growth and salary increases among nonacademic staff. In fact then-president George Campbell, Jr. was ranked by the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2009 among the ten highest-paid college presidents, with an annual compensation package valued at $688,773, for overseeing a school with fewer than 1,000 students. According to tax records the ten highest-paid officers at Cooper collectively made approximately $2.9 million in 2010. Meanwhile the approximately fifty-six full-time faculty members made roughly $5 million combined.

T. C. Wescott, the vice-president of finances of the college, has noted that a recent $4 million in cuts were largely directed at the administration, and that in 2013 the overall budget is approximately half administrative, half academic, in line with other institutions. But it should be asked whether this is necessary for a school with a very small student body and a full-scholarship policy. “The Way Forward” contains a modest proposal that the top three administrative officers defer a third of their compensation until 2018, when the college will receive increased income from the Chrysler Building. Bharucha, whose compensation package has been valued at about $750,000, has pledged to donate 5 percent of his base salary to the school.

Underpaid faculty, overpaid administrators, and campus expansions that drive up the cost of education can be found at colleges large and small across the country. At the April 2012 community summit, art student Alan Lundgard noted that should the tuition model go through, “Our problems will exemplify our country’s inability to provide for its citizens an education unencumbered by the barriers of class privilege or wealth. We must make it clear, that it is not the unique ideals of this institution that are built to fail, but the educational disasters that run rampant everywhere else in this country.”

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In August 2012, Bharucha charged the deans and faculty of each school with coming up with academic programs that would meet prescribed revenue targets ($6 million, $3.6 million, and $2.4 million for the engineering, art, and architecture schools, respectively). If faculty did not meet these revenue targets, they would be threatened with the closure of their school.

On December 3, 2012, eleven Cooper Union art students barricaded themselves on the top floor of the Foundation Building and draped across it a red banner that read “Free Education to All.” These students had three demands: that the administration publicly affirm its commitment to free education; that the board immediately implement more transparent and democratic decision-making structures; and that Bharucha step down. The first day of the occupation coincided with a day of action at Cooper Union organized in collaboration with Occupy Wall Street, All in the Red, and Strike Debt. Several faculty members joined the student occupiers at a joint press conference. That evening, speakers from other schools rallied in solidarity with students of Cooper Union.

Although their demands had not been met, the students left the building after one week to plan their next action. The faculty did as they were told and came up with various revenue-based programs, even as they continued to express their opposition to a tuition model. In December 2012, the art school faculty refused to vote on the new programs they had proposed. This February, the art faculty issued another statement, “reaffirming our belief that The Cooper Union is not only the last citadel of the social reforms movement of the 19th century, but is in fact the vanguard of the 21st century—a beacon of access to free education.” In response, the administration refused to admit early decision students to the art school. Faced with the real possibility of their school closing, the art faculty gave in and submitted their proposals for revenue-based graduate, continuing education, and high-school summer courses.

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The administration now seems close to announcing a decision regarding tuition. On March 1, at the request of the alumni association, trustees appeared again at the Great Hall to answer questions from the community. Trustee Thomas Driscoll said at the forum that he didn’t think the school could shrink to sustainability—crucially, he was referring to shrinking academic programs and not administrative costs. Faculty, students, and alumni asked whether Cooper could live within its revenue stream from the Chrysler Building, $40 million a year, cut administrative costs, and grow its endowment through more effective, alumni-led fundraising.

One recommendation made by “The Way Forward” is that Cooper Union “grow down.” Rather than invest in fee-based programming, what if Cooper instead focused on strengthening its roots and giving back to the community, spreading the culture of free education and illustrating that Cooper’s benefits are not just for the few who merit entry? There are existing programs in which Cooper Union students tutor and mentor New York City public school students. Some of these are facing budget cuts. Rather than curb these efforts, what if Cooper Union grew them? “If you can do that, your community will fight for you,” Perta said. She later posted on the Save Cooper Union Facebook page a line from a wild fermentation cookbook: “To be indispensable to the organisms with which one shares an environment—that is the strategy that ensures successful . . . and continued survival.” This would represent another kind of union with the community, in which education would be considered as vital as air and water.

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Issue 16 Launch Party, April 13

2013-04-08T18:12:22Z

New York Readers,

Please join us for

The Issue 16 Launch Party 
8 PM–12 AM, Saturday, April 13
Secret Project Robot
389 Melrose Street, Brooklyn, NY
(off the Morgan Avenue L)

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Subscribe now and enter discount code SWEETSIXTEEN at checkout for one of the best deals around: a one-year print subscription (and party admission) for $25.

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