The Hopkins Review Vol. 15 No. 2 by Johns Hopkins University Press

Spring 2022

Two Roses—like the surrounding body of work in Stephen Towns: Declaration & Resistance, which was on view at The Westmoreland Museum of American Art in Greensburg, PA from January 30, 2022 through May 8, 2022—explores Black American labor and the importance of historically Black colleges and universities (hbcus). This work is inspired by an image from the Harbison Agricultural College Photograph Collection, South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina Libraries.

Stephen Towns Two Roses 2021 Acrylic, oil, and copper leaf on panel. Courtesy of the Artist and De Buck30Gallery.×40in.

Learn more about The Hopkins Review Volume 15’s Featured Artist at HopkinsReview.com

Spring15.22022 literature & culture

THE HOPKINS REVIEW Volume 15, Issue 2 Spring 2022 issn 139-6589 · New Series Copyright © 2022 Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights reserved. The Hopkins Review is a literary quarterly published by Johns Hopkins University Press for the Writing Seminars of Johns Hopkins University. It features fiction, poetry, and personal essays; criticism and public-facing scholarship; interviews, visual art, and translations; and reviews of books, performances, and exhibits. The Hopkins Review thanks the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute and the Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts & Sciences at Johns Hopkins University for their invaluable support. Address all editorial correspondence to: The Hopkins Review The Writing Seminars Johns Hopkins University 3400 North Charles Street Baltimore, MD 21218 Editors@HopkinsReview.com Unsolicited manuscripts may be submitted using our online submission manager at TheHopkinsReview.Submittable.com/Submit during October. Visit us online at HopkinsReview.com for more information and content. designed & typeset by sevy perez For subscriptions, permissions, postal, and other publishing information, please see the back page.

Spring15.22022

literature & culture 13 Safia Elhillo takes a bite and takes the wheel 20

John

Kate Bernheimer takes the stage 102 Oliver de la Paz consorts with roads, boats, ghosts 155 Barth constellates in good company and much more in this inissue

Letter from

Barth was among the Writing Seminars’ first graduates, earning his BA in 1951 and his MA in 1952, and he returned in 1973 to teach for 22 years. I am especially thrilled to publish his work in thr , as his first published short story, “Lilith and the Lion,” appeared in the pages of this journal’s first incarnation (in the Fall 1950 issue of The Hopkins Review) when he was still an undergraduate. His work also appeared 58 years later in the first volume of John T. Irwin’s thr “New Series” relaunch in 2008. This is to say, Barth’s history is intertwined with our institutional and editorial history, and we hope that Writing Seminars graduates—and anyone else with an interest in mentorship and great writing—will savor this issue’s concluding folio in honor of the inimitable Professor Emeritus John Barth.

W elcome to The Hopkins Review 15.2, the second issue of our 15th anniversary volume. In its pages, you’ll find a literary cornucopia of poetry, fiction, translations, essays, and reviews. You’ll also encounter two significant tributes to creative titans—one of visual art, the other of literature. The first is curator and critic Karen Wilkin’s remembrance of “national treasure” Wayne Thiebaud, who died last year on December 25 at the age of 101. Wilkin’s “In Memoriam” piece serves as introduction to a folio of his paintings from both the 20th and 21st centuries. Her curation deepens Thiebaud’s familiar legacy, beginning with Pie Rows, a representative “celebration of vernacular American foodstuffs,” before moving into figure paintings and landscapes equally arresting, if perhaps less familiar to the casual admirer of Thiebaud’s work. The issue concludes with its second tribute, a folio of essays, written mostly by former students, in honor of iconic postmodern fiction writer John Barth, who celebrated his 92nd birthday in May. This August, Dalkey Archive Press will bring out a new edition of The Sot-Weed Factor, that “modern classic” first published in 1960 and celebrated in Time as Barth’s “most distinguished masterpiece.” postscripts : Just Desserts, a collection of Barth’s unpublished late writings, is forthcoming from Dalkey Archive Press as well, and we’re honored to feature a piece from that collection here. As such, the folio dedicated to Barth’s influence begins with an account of Barth’s own influences.

the Editor

As Elliott Coleman Professor Jean McGarry writes in her essay “Cher Maître: John Barth, an Introduction” (thr 9.3, Summer 2016), “[He] conducted the writers’ workshop, as he did everything at Johns Hopkins and, most likely, in all departments of his life, with method, precision, and elegance.” I end with McGarry’s words because her admiration for Barth is consonant with my admiration for her upon her own retirement from the Writing Seminars after 35 years. As Professor Brad Leithauser and KriegerEisenhower Professor Mary Jo Salter are also retiring, one might call it the end of an era—and so it is, in the classroom and at the faculty meeting. But in art, this is just the turning of a page, as the creative conversations sparked in and by their work continue. We here at thr hope you find the spirit of both lively chat and thoughtful colloquy thriving in the following pages as well. Love from Baltimore,

Dora editorMalechinchief The Hopkins Review

James Arthur, Nate Brown, Anna Celenza, Danielle Evans, Kyeong-Soo Kim, Brad Leithauser, Andrew Motion, Katharine Noel, Richard Panek, Eric Puchner, Shannon Robinson, Joanne Cavanaugh Simpson, Greg Williamson, David Yezzi (Editor in Chief Emeritus) contributing editors

senior administrative coordinator The Writing Seminars

Gina Apostol, Max Apple, Melvin E. Brown, J. M. Coetzee, Louise Erdrich, Rhina P. Espaillat, Jalen Eutsey, Anna Maria Hong, Shane McCrae, Alice McDermott, Jean McGarry, Wendel Patrick, Mary Jo Salter, Dave Smith, Ernest Suarez, Rosanna Warren, Afaa M. Weaver, David Wyatt advisory editors

Amy Lynwander design director Sevy Perez editorial assistant Thu Nhat Pham faculty advisory editors

Josiah A. R. Cox, Regan Green, Phoebe Oathout readers

John T. Irwin (1940–2019) senior editor Maya Chesley lead assistant editor Spencer Hupp editor in chief Dora Malech managing editor Kosiso Ugwueze

assistant editors

Melissa Cook, Journey Fetter, Renée Flory, Elle Grant, Tzu Hsien (Charlene) Huang, Christine Ji, Landen Raszick, Megan Robinson, Brianna Steidle

John Astin, John Barth, Phyllis Berger, William Breichner, Logan D. Browning, Robert L. Friedman, Jeanne-Marie Jackson, Christine Jowers, Joanne Leedom-Ackerman, Edward Perlman, Wyatt Prunty, John D. Rockefeller V, Winston Tabb, Susan Weiss, Karen Wilkin new series founding editor

poetry poetry poetry poetry fiction translation poetry poetry fiction poetry Safia Elhillo Sudan,PastoralTX C. T. Salazar Four Snakes Makes Our Flag Four Snakes Makes Our Flag D. A. Powell Year of No Faces Year of No Face Helen Hofling Let It Be Lost Kate Bernheimer Fitcher’s Bird Avrom Sutzkever Poems Translated and Introduced by Zackary Sholem Berger Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán surrender, no, siren Gabriel Spera Gymnastics School Layhannara Tep Love Like Applesauce torrin a. greathouse Cripple Sex Manifesto Elegy for Craigslist Personals 13 14 15 16 17 19 20 24 32 33 34 51 52 The Hopkins Review Volume 15, Issue 02, Spring 2022 visit HopkinsReview.com for more literature and culture

poetry essay translation poetry poetry art fiction poetry essay essay film review Jalynn Harris The Lump Ars Poetica Heather H. Yeung Stations: On Eric Gill and the Poetics of Stone Kim Ok Poems Translated and Introduced by Ryan Choi Ananda Lima óculosParallax A. E. Stallings The Peahen Wayne Thiebaud Introduced by Karen Wilkin Terri Nowak Call Me Oliver de la Paz Diaspora Sonnets James Scales Cicadas Michael A. Gonzales Dreamin’ California Eileen G’Sell Fair Is Foul and Foul Is Fair: Joel Cohen’s Visionary The Tragedy of Macbeth 53 54 55 66 78 79 80 81 93 102 108 117 125

C. Diane Scharper

the Story! R.

book review book review book review book review essay essay essay essay essay

Kendra

Boylan On

Jalen Eutsey Allen’s Z. L.

Emerson’s Neugebauer

Friedman Jack but Not John Barth Michael Martone Gunkholing: An Anecdotary 128 133 138 147 155 158 164 169 172 celebrating barth: a folio

World: Concord and Discord Samantha

the Base of a Crucifixion: On The Death of Francis Bacon

Nickels

Jennifer Finney with L.

The Violent, Complicated, and Mythbusting Lives of Women John Barth Navigation Stars Gina Apostol May Your Muse Still Be Singing

Two Figures at

Learning & Unlearning

Safia Elhillo Pastoral

if we ever again meet i have a story about persimmons to make you laugh, how i mistook them for tomatoes. i have a story about bay leaves, plucked from the side of the road, one forgotten & crisped perfectly, dried at the bottom of my purse. i want to show the way california inflects my speaking, california in its frankness, long seasonless line, clear clauses, the bay & the lake like parentheses. days like an orange peeled in that unbroken spiral. i place inside me figs & nectarines, gnarled tomatoes of the season, limes split & salted to eat like we did in childhood, collected as cousins, faces always sticky with fruit. our parents in forgotten shapes among their siblings, wearing their first faces, bickering at the table. the way i tell the story i am outside looking in, but in the photographs we are indistinguishable, us children, enormous eyes & unbrushed hair, a drooping sock, dressed in each other’s clothes. in the memory we are a single organism, our hundred legs & arms shining with vaseline, our feet the color of dust, in motion. when we meet again it will be as strangers, & i will offer my story about persimmons to show my absent mind, my great forgetting, & i imagine you are polite as we have all grown up to be, laughing into the air between us

I say they who named my country & don’t know to whom I refer— British, Ottoman, Egyptian, crossing the threshold & declaring, This land. Black. Everywhere the smell of metal, known to me only as the copper smell of blood. I did not pass that test & have since forgotten what I learned, 30 years old & still unfit to drive, to drive as in to thrust, to plunge, to learn the responsibility of great violence. Machine in which I sit & become a hazard, meaning danger but also meaning chance or venture or fate. Its etymologies claim Arabic, al-zahr defined as chance or luck though I only know it as flower. The Arabic which also names my country, Jumhuriyat al-Sudan: Republic of the Blacks. In the elevator a woman draws her child closer to her side, handbag flattening between them, when my brother & I enter & smile, threatening great violence. I learn of a Sudan in Texas, population 958, named by its postmaster, who never said why, & without the prefix Bilad, meaning land of, the name of the city is Blacks. In the photographs it could be anywhere, long flat stretch of road, power lines & grass. But I want what I am promised. Thick cough of exhaust, then the great machine arriving, my body sighing for rest.

poetry

Sudan, TX, Safia Elhillo

Safia Elhillo Sudan, TX

Land of the Blacks, they named my country— at the driving school my instructor seized the wheel when I continued to drift into the left lane, not yet taught to regard the great machine as more of my body. My first years here I would grow alert, as if called, thinking it was that name I heard being spoken, of our dark concentration of bodies, only to learn it is a kind of car, the sedan, blackening the air with exhaust, waste gases I imagine to be named for the act of depletion, tired lungs of the car sighing for rest.

C. T. Salazar Four Snakes Makes Our Flag who horsed the horizon welcome world welcome whirl’d + dusty clouds who rolled the sticky moon over me so its blue dye took with it my shirt a color I wrap home in tomatoes becoming red so slowly who picked this field for the massacre + the neighboring field for the cemetery who buried the boy beneath so many comets consequences confederates who is not dirtied by the word the flag the rust mud speckled truck called inheritance who tied the antlers to his back like wings the boy buried beneath

Salazar poetry C.

Four Snakes Makes Our Flag C. T. T. Salazar Four Snakes Makes Our Flag my body (the past is still a place and almost anyone could become oh god in this room we’re just furniture do tell if the thunder’s out -side my head a door doomed to latch up the dark I am more afraid of what a man having a bad day could to me it’s not that this language will be the death of me just those who speak it honey it’s may you can tell by the windchime right before the trellis bridge came down it sounded just like that maybe when I’m older I’ll misunderstand when you smile I feel a dog’s mouth let go my heart adorn me morning mingled with birds whose names nest the road I take to you cruelty being the thing making my blood azaleas then blood again) : my bonfire

The year I saw no one where we met no place in no time, in no time at all. Year as hallway year of always the year we never met. Year of no lips year of no ships year of no shape, no shit, a ghost, many ghosts, a host of ghosts. Decimal clocks. A year of seconds and thirds, the hump year, the jump (which is not the same as the leap year), no moon but the old moon no smile just some crinkling around the eyes. And no surprise.

poetry17

Year of No Faces Year of No Face, D. A. Powell

D. A. Powell Year of No Faces Year of No Face

Helen Hofling Let It Be Lost

Let it be lost. Let it be litter. Let it be put out on a Tuesday night. Let it be left over. Let it be donated, scavenged, swapped At a meeting. Let it be shelved improperly Beside chipped flatware. Let it be swept. Let it lie LetSleeping.itdream of broken pieces In a dustpan. Let it be sliced and peeled like a tin can Or dragged from a fender. Let it be washed across a toxic stream

Filling with silt, amoeba, coin. Let it be punctured. Let it be crushed. Let it be sick and never OnlyRecover.let it be done! But let it be art I am saying goodbye To my lover.

The scene resembled a story I had read more than a hundred times called “Fitcher’s Bird.” It was about a girl whose older sister was mutilated, as in cut into parts. The girl had tried faithfully yet unsuccessfully to rescue her sister before her violent death, and carried her sister’s bones in a rucksack. All over the world. Later the girl reassembled the bones, and the sister came back to life. The story had been retold in wax figures by an American artist. She then photographed the wax figures that was the artwork, not the wax figures themselves. She was invited by a very glossy magazine to create this story for them, but when she submitted it to them it was rejected for being too dark. What did they expect from her? It is a story about mutilation!

I used to show the American artist’s images as part of my performance. However, it turned out that I was horrified by these images. It took me some time to recognize this, but as soon as I recognized this, I removed them.

his was the difficult part. I was in a cave and the cave featured bears. The bears, or at least one bear, was assembling small bones to make little dolls, and the bears, or at least one bear, kept herself busy with a small trunk filled with doll costumes. I joined in with the bears. Painstakingly, I mended a pair of tiny overalls for one bear, not for a doll. The fit was unlikely to work for the bear, yet I was determined. I rethreaded the needle with a nice shade of pink.

I thought of this in the cave, as I sewed with the bears. And I thought of a place called The Gardens, where I once saw a ballet with a dancing bear in it. I had been invited to perform there that night, and I spent the day in the city with a friend who dragged me all over the place. She had heard of a botanical garden that she said we could easily walk to. Well! It turned out to be two hours away, and besides, it had fallen into great disrepair. All the buildings had broken windows, most of the plants were dead, and the statue of Diana at its entrance deeply disturbed me. I smiled at my friend, of course, throughout our arduous journey, because she was eager to please me. She had joined me for this leg of the tour upon my request. She got lost on our way back to the hotel. It took us four hours to get there.

Kate Bernheimer Fitcher’s Bird

I still made it to The Gardens in time for my performance. Before I was to be on stage, that was when the ballet took place. Dancing bear,

As the ballet dragged on, I thought about a lot of things, such as, “Are bears prehistoric? When were there bears? Were there bears thousands of years ago, at the time of cave painting? What is the sequence tonight—do I begin with the white dress and lullaby, then move into the swan’s theme, and then, when the neon begins, I do artistic ballet?” Would ballet after ballet be tiresome for the viewers, I wondered. No, it would not. And I rehearsed, in my head, the banter I had been given: “How was your supper tonight? Squash blossoms and pansies? Delectable! You, in the tuxedo with the red lipstick. You look beautiful, babe!” The banter was all wrong, I slowly realized. As the sun slunk down, a melancholy shadow cast over the lawn, which glistened with rain. The banter was entirely too jaunty for this remarkable setting. Too sensible. What I sought was more meaningful. I quickly found the right tone. “Have you seen the chestnut flowers by the Ferris wheel? You must, if you haven’t. Existential. You in the tuxedo, with the red lipstick, you remind me of a Russian bell. Dissonant. Spellbinding. Would you like to be my date at the Anarkist Bar after the show? Would you like to share something bitter?” And the swan theme would need to be replaced with the doll fugue. Though I was fond of the swan. I would keep her, and add the doll fugue, yes, it was settled. I lost track of my friend, but she could take care of herself. She was a person who pretended to be hapless, but this was untrue. One example is that when she was supposed to meet me at the hotel, upon arrival from America, instead she found a drag bar and bought some cigarettes. She was two hours late to the lobby as a result. This, after texting me a dozen times from the airport worried she would not be able to find her way, worried the hotel desk would not give her a key to our room as my management never added guests to my room (and my room was under a false name, for my protection, which I couldn’t even give to my friend), etcetera. She had a point, really, on that. She had made some dear friends by the time she found me and wasn’t even certain she would come to the performance at all, she even had said. I mean, that’s fine, because I had told her I wouldn’t be able to entertain her on the days that I had to work,

soldier, woman in gown, little boy (an irritant, of course why must they cast children?) . . . tinkly music . . . white peacock.

22 © 2022 Kate Bernheimer Fitcher’s Bird, Kate Bernheimer fiction that she would be basically on her own, and I wouldn’t be in my right mind as I prepared for the stage. All the same, I had somehow expected her to well, you know. Be there with me. She was with me when the hairdresser and makeup artist came to the room. I felt she looked a little spoiled and petulant, to be honest. The whole time the makeup artist and hairdresser worked on me, what did she do? She ate every snack the hotel had sent up with the crew all the olives, almonds, fried sardines, and every last cheese rod and worked her way through the minibar with its tiny bottles of Campari and Fernet-Branca. She seemed unmoved when I realized that the makeup artist had completely ruined my eyebrows. I had to wash them off and redo them myself with very little time, and she barely, I mean barely, bothered to help me find the right pencil. Please know, I am very much not a selfish person. She knows how much stage fright I get, even after all these years, and even after all my success. In the past, she seemed eager to help me with my emotions, that’s all I am trying to say here. I was well aware I had emotional problems and I know she was aware of this too. In the past she had been completely sympathetic to my overall situation, which is very difficult. There are too many demands upon me. But something has changed in my friend. It is very dramatic, the difference, but she denies it exists. It was probably this that set the night off poorly. Though the show went extremely well, as it always does, the entire team and I convened at the Anarkist Bar afterwards, and the woman in the tuxedo and red lipstick joined me, and that is when things took a bad turn. I never drink. For me, it is poison. But the woman and I shared a few thimbles of an arsenicgreen beverage, and the next thing I knew there I was, in the cave with the bears, with the threaded needle in one hand and so forth. I was in the sad swan costume a feather dress with a swan’s head draped over one shoulder. The thought came to me clear as day: I had been careless with my friend’s kindness. And while the cause was stage fright and self-hatred, not unkindness on my own part, I knew it would be a long time before she would forgive me, if ever she would. We haven’t spoken for a very long time, and I haven’t yet forgiven myself, though I am working on that with my management team.

The Hopkins Review Volume 15, Issue 02, Spring 2022

I dedicated my next tour to my friend. I called the tour “Fitcher’s Bird.” The lighting designer completely outdid herself on that one. People were changed by the show. They left the theater weeping, sometimes with a strange new limp or lilt in their gait. They generally also became quite obsessed fans after it I mean, if they hadn’t been before it already. This hadn’t been my intention, and I have had to redouble my efforts to maintain the thinnest shred of a private existence since then. When people learn where my house is, they come to my door to thank me for helping them stay alive. I find it deeply unpleasant and also alarming, because the person I have been trying to help most of all, all of these years, the only person I have ever tried to help and have failed over and over again, is myself, with my Art.

translation

Introduction: Building with the Mind of Avrom Sutzkever

What makes the dove different from Sutzkever’s previous poetic ministries, and what does the “Ode to the Dove” teach us about Sutzkever and the course of his work over decades? Who intoxicated the fingers and made them write the line “The heroics of those done with living are all in me sown!”

My dove, you gave me a sheet of paper—a mirror.

The narrator of this ode is an adult looking back at a childhood that looks back at the dead, in order to memorialize them, but also telling the story of an encounter between the past and future that the boy makes possible by reviving the messenger. The dove then gives him a magical tool, a mirror: a sheet of paper.

R arely, but once in a childhood,” writes Avrom Sutzkever, one of the greatest Yiddish poets of the 20th century, beginning his 10-canto Ode to the Dove” with a vision of a multicolored visitor, an angel, who leaves him a feather (which in Yiddish can also be a pen). The reader of Sutzkever will be forgiven for seeing in this “rarely” more than a touch of exaggeration. Sutzkever is a poet of visions, multicolored and single-hued, borne by a plethora of messengers, often centering the poet himself. Since his first works of poetry in the 1920s, he saw himself as the prophet of nature and the Yiddish word.

The narrator does not use that paper to reflect on his ancestors’ mortality, or on the tragedy of their slaughter. (It should be mentioned that Sutzkever’s memorial poetry about the Holocaust, in realistic, fabulist, and lyric modes, occupies a number of volumes.) In 1954, seven years after Sutzkever’s immigration to Israel, and at the very same time that he is publishing poetry extolling the landscape of Israel, and (in one instance) the state’s army, this narrator does not take it as his mission to help construct a country or a community. No—he is to “build and build a temple, build with a mind like the sun.” This charge is repeated several times throughout the long poem, and

Avrom Sutzkever introduced by Zackary Sholem Berger Avrom Sutzkever Translated from the Yiddish & Introduced by Zackary Sholem Berger

In the wake of genocide, our narrator is vouchsafed a vision of a messenger from the heavens who appoints him as the builder of a temple motivated by the intelligence (seykhl) of the sun. This is Sutzkever’s individualist ars poetica, as anti-Adorno as one might wish—a declaration of the rights of the poet after the Holocaust.

While the temple in the “Ode to the Dove” was built with a mind like the sun, the mind of the Diary Poems is too preoccupied to have such a singular focus. It is grappling with weighty thoughts about death, friendship, the nonexistence of God. And it’s not clear to whom these thoughts are addressed (like undelivered letters). Perhaps to the dead who pull the poet out of bed and into a nighttime embrace. Perhaps in the shade of that sunbuilt temple; and thus, the Ode and the Diary are two sides of the same mind, which built and built.

Review

The Hopkins Volume 15, Issue 02, Spring 2022

In keeping with that individual spirit, the 1970s saw the start of another, more drawn-out lyric creation from Sutzkever, but many-jointed this time, and philosophical. The Diary Poems would be the bulk of Sutzkever’s verse production for the next 30 years (published in volumes under different names).

it is the concluding line. It is a line which calls out for analysis, which we can’t do in extenso here. But we can start thinking about it. In Yiddish, the word Sutzkever uses is not beys-hamikdesh, not the Hebrew-derived word describing the Temple in Jerusalem, but the Romance, or international word, templ. Perhaps redolent, all the same, of the Israelite adytum, but weighted more towards the paganic end of the spectrum.

—Zackary Sholem Berger February 2022 / Adar I 5782

World. What’s the world? Just her melody’s waveish, forested, worldly Keening her godly melody into my veins: Be lordly! I snuff out the keening in seas. Unknown cities then greet me.

26 Ode to the Dove VII, Avrom Sutzkever, trans. Zackary Sholem Berger translation Avrom Sutzkever Ode to the Dove VII

“Master of Hell! Perhaps you would like to exchange hells? I will stroll in your fires, while in theirs you’ll reciprocally stroll. It will not diminish your eternal marmoreal glory. You are still Alighieri—and your hell still allegory.” People. Where are the people? The dust is to be envied. Only in the words of Someone one finds their belief, their spirit. Cemetery echoes. Who hears them? For me, though, they are a lodging. Wait! Halevi sang out, lionlike—out of Spain—my longing. You poets—hey! Without you, this life is spent napping, Would have long ago dropped to its knees before death like a camel. Human and beast would be tortured, lonely, in pain. My dove wouldn’t be with me, faithfully, on her flute, through all lands.

Wait! In a rain of tercets we’re playfully doused by Dante.

Who is the echo of silence and who is the silence in blush?

Bergertranslation

Just today, stones did stone themselves in the street.

Who’s breathing me in like a rainbow, near the rain-drenched forest?

Dancer, tell me—where are you? My hair senses your flutter. The dove can’t give me an answer: where is your home, where’s your theater? Your eyes bring me this once a doe in sunshine’s dew.

She buries in garlands an eagle wishing—for her breasts—a kiss. Who is the mirror in tears? Who are the faces, those new ones?

27Ode to the Dove VIII, Avrom Sutzkever, trans. Zackary Sholem

Who is that snowvalanche aglow over rockface abyss?

Avrom Sutzkever to the Dove VIII

Ode

No one at all will answer me? Are insanities burning inside me?

In the coffin, who is that woman? The funeral covered with roses? The wheels keep turning and turning, devouring and binding my shadow. A shovel buried itself in a grave full of dirt, just today. Who is the white transformation, which cannot emerge from the birch?

Where is the tremble in gardens with blossoms Chagallian blue?

Who is the naked wave, so flexible because so boneless?

Drew me through jungles till I saw it once lying

Full of star-scent. Nearby a lion on a cliff wall

Far off in the world fell a meteor of stone, and its melody

Who is the stone? It’s familiar. Music under golden ribs. The heavens-child calls me by name. Lips are drawn to lips.

Don’t ask—I am the dancer. The lion with his roaring—long live. The king has foretold for me that you’ll arrive, arrive, arrive. Limbs are freezing. Till my body, consumed by love Will be completely extinguished. Quiet my lips, come closer. I’ll leave a sign for you, three last drops of blood Before the moon becomes my tombstone at my head. I am the snowvalanche, the white birch and the mirror, I am the echo of silence embracing you in a circle. Gather the sounds and the pictures, your neighborhood lit up by hunger.

Forged bells while roaring—flame melted them all.

28 Ode to the Dove IX, Avrom Sutzkever, trans. Zackary Sholem Berger translation Avrom Sutzkever Ode to the Dove IX

Give them life, enliven, depict!That’s how we said farewell.

Under a tree at the Reed Sea, the waves sound out my ode.

Ode to the Dove X, Avrom Sutzkever, trans. Zackary Sholem

Miles-long tread under sands, large as the desert its number. Let the locust dunes uncover this vision still deeper.

Should I render the magic lamp again in blue and green?

A blind hyena’s mercy; there remain only bones, bones?

“Dove, you’re the same, can it be, your wings are not gray?

Quiet. In its shadow, turned from the sun, a hardworking millstone. I breathe the locust dunes, keepers of time and memory.

Bergertranslation

Ode to the Dove X

Avrom Sutzkever

Should I build my temple here, like I built it daily?

Build and build the temple, build with a mind like the sun!”

Stalks with the eyes of children are in motion under the dunes. The stalks are resurrected. Above, a cloud of strings.

Through forty Biblical years the people traveled here.

Where are my four decades, in the desert, together with those?

The dove coos on my shoulder: “Good morning! And I’ll ask you: Years are only bones, are they? Blow on them, they’ll playfully meet you.”

I’ll hear what the night is saying in its sleep now. [1974]

The bed’s paws, crouching, are swamp-sunken deep. Blue marks are left over on the pillow, Like violets before snowfall, under fairest snow. But the second one, to whom the first is yet unknown, Grabs him with her arms, like a rudder in a storm: So the other one shouldn’t tear him from her body, take him there Where in green still in hiding are the poppy flowers.

Someone’s gargling, in spasms like a half-dead slaughtered fowl. Gargling, in terror; in the smooth stall, hot lightning strikes. Someone calls him—“Come to me.” The other—“Protect.”

30 From Diary Poems, Avrom Sutzkever, trans. Zackary Sholem Berger translation Avrom Sutzkever From Diary Poems

Hollowed out by jealousy, the woman who tells him “Come” Lit on fire like poppy blooms in red all around. Her eyes, somewhere else, see what’s happening here.

I’ll hear what the night is saying in its sleep now.

Diary Poems, Avrom Sutzkever, trans. Zackary Sholem

My letter carrier isn’t going to deliver. The clock will stop in the long archive. The letter carrier was brought in a sack by another To a house under clay. I thought—perhaps he’s coming? The bell yawps, he arrives—the second one.

Avrom Sutzkever From Diary Poems

My letter carrier isn’t going to deliver. [1974]

“Where’s it from, dear? This letter, my postman? I’ve never seen a stamp like this, The dusty boots—from the earth or moondust?”

Bergertranslation

“I don’t know where it’s from, I’m not allowed To read it, I just know whence the envelope. It’s cold there, button up your blouse, yeah.” The letter carrier wafts away, I kiss the mezuzah.

From

surrender, no, siren, Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán

poetry Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán surrender, no, siren keep the flame for us both, darken the embers, coals, your eyes, reignit, mainit, soil darkened, kohled, within, a brown box you braid, basket you carve again and again, open beneath the waves, graves, dry places our air-bubbled ancestors gathered warmth from blue flames, asphalt alit, anthracite agates still forming, bitumen billows, bellows, from all the oceans, fellows gather with you below, blow the slapping sounds of moons swoon crashing shores before our finned fingers left so long ago, mermanic panics of penultimate temples fell to the ground, our feet fondling fronds, sands into pearls, black, we breathe back into shells, abalone adorn, sworn, our ears adherent, no longer dangle a dalliance, gills refilled, coffins returned unburned to conifers, evergreen our sway, subnivean arboreal pines pinned, twinned, we re-tinder tender our kindling kin, our re-blued hearts beat ventricular red-bled beads of glossen worry, slurry this scrying glass: so many martian meteorite landings, rebrandings, upon our obstinate obsidian souls

At home in the forms we all will someday wear in Heaven, they sprint and dive and tumble over like no one versed in physics would ever dare, piking and torquing cascadingly through the air to land as someone stopped by an old lover— invisibly shaken, breathlessly self-aware, but beaming through the instant it takes to recover from gut check and wince the body’s fierce career.

Gabriel Spera Gymnastics School

“Don’t tell your mom,” Maly said to Tina, as they drove from Long Beach Memorial Hospital to the home Maly shared with Vanida and Arune. She didn’t need Vanida to fuss over her, especially when there was nothing that could be done.

Layhannara Tep Love Like Applesauce

This couldn’t be right. In all her 61 years of life, she’d never even smoked a cigarette. While everyone she knew either lit a stick or two to cap off the evening or chewed and spat tobacco for fun, she didn’t allow herself to indulge. Now she wished she had. It would be nice to have one bad habit to lean into. If this taught her anything, it’s that nothing good ever came from a life of Malyrestraint.couldn’t understand a word the American doctor was saying but she recognized the look in his eyes. It was the same look of sympathy she saw in the eyes of the European volunteers at the Kao-I-Dang refugee camp in Thailand all those years ago. The same look that her sponsor gave her, her sister Vanida, and brother-in-law Arune when they first arrived at the Portland airport after seeking asylum in 1981, 30 years ago. She hated that look because it said, I’m sorry. It said, This is the best we couldButdo.this was no one’s fault. For as long as Maly could remember, her body had been her enemy. She could never get it to do what she needed: say the right things, fall in love with the right kind of person. This was the natural consequence of living in an uncooperative body. It was the reason she was just a little past her sixth decade of life and had neither marriage nor children to show for it. The reason she moved in with Vanida and her family 15 years ago. The reason her niece, Tina, took her to the hospital after she had to admit she felt chest pains so grave, the usual remedies were not helping. The reason that although she lived frugally and put away every penny, she would not live long enough to spend her savings.

hen the doctor told Maly—via her niece’s English-to-Khmer translation—that she had stage IV lung cancer and less than six months left to live, she wanted to laugh. Had she become a cliché in one of those Asian soap operas her sister was always watching?

“I am being serious,” Maly said. She turned before her own eyes

“Alright.” Tina’s eyes lit from the challenge just as they reached the house. She parked and turned to face Maly, “Have you ever been in love?”

“I just meant, is there someone else you can confide in?”

“Well . . . what happened?”

“As you can see,” Maly lifted her empty palms up and gestured to the air in front of her, invoking her best Vanna White impersonation. It was something she picked up from her years working in the garment factory, where Wheel of Fortune played in the background to remind her and her coworkers that their luck could change if only they could spell.

“Who else is there?” Vanida was Maly’s only link to home. Their parents and brothers never made it past the communist Khmer Rouge regime.

“Of course—I’m 61!”

“Other than mom, dad, and me . . . is there someone else you can rely on?”

“But we have six months,” Tina said. Her gaze took on an intensity Maly recognized. They were the eyes of her late mother, urging Maly to run, to save herself while she safeguarded their home the day Phnom Penh fell. Maly found it hard to look away. “Tell me what to do,” Tina said.

“It’s enough that you drive me around.”

“But Dr. Hastings said it’s important to rely on your support system.”

“Do you still have feelings for your ex?”

“It is what it is,” Maly said. “There are some things you can’t fight.”

The Hopkins Review Volume 15, Issue 02, Spring 2022

“I’ll tell her eventually.” Maly had decided against chemotherapy as she rather liked her full head of hair and wanted every strand to follow her to the grave. Besides, the doctor confirmed that the cancer had already spread far beyond her lungs and chemo would only prolong her time by a few months at best. But she knew Vanida would try to hang on to every month, that Vanida would ask her to fight.

“I’m not someone who changes their mind easily.”

“Please be serious for once. It’s not like you’re getting any younger.” That’s when Maly realized Tina’s eyes had been wells all along. The way they brimmed with each word.

“Not really.” Although Maly knew exactly what Tina meant.

“Like everyone else in our family.”

A laugh escaped Tina’s lips and all at once, she was laughing and crying until there was no telling the difference. Soon Maly was laughing and crying too. Because that’s all you can do when you’ve cashed in six decades of hard living for six months of change.

* *

“Won’t he dock your pay?” Maly asked, as Vanida shuffled through her hangers.Maly slipped the gold ring in her coat pocket and stuffed the 25 letters into her purse before Vanida could turn around again.

She cupped one side of her face with a palm in the cheeky manner all the pretty female Asian soap opera leads display to feign humble selfadmiration. She even winked at her own reflection.

threatened to mirror Tina’s. Maly could think of a few places she needed to go; two people she needed to see.

The following Saturday, Maly woke up early to finish packing for the twoweek road trip with Tina along the Pacific Coast Highway. She unzipped her luggage and laid it open on the bedroom floor, double-checking the items on her mental list as Vanida entered her room and threw the closet open.Even though Vanida had an early morning shift at the donut shop, she asked her boss if she could start an hour later just so she could see Maly off.

Maly flipped the car’s passenger mirror open and ran a hand through her hair, combing past the knots in her black and white-peppered waves. She smiled at the thought of her birthday, eight months away. “On the upside,” she said, “it looks like I won’t be getting any older either. Bet a lot of women can’t say that.”

“After 10 years of never missing a shift? He better not.” Vanida selected a North Face jacket and two scarves. “Don’t forget it can get cold in Oregon.”

Laugh and cry. That’s all Maly has done since she learned, all those years ago, that the person she loves and the person who loves her are not the same. *

“It’s July.” Maly rolled her eyes but took the jacket and scarves from Vanida“Howanyway.about this pretty dress?” Vanida pulled out a red and white checkered sundress that Maly hadn’t touched since she was in her forties. Vanida hung the dress in front of her, placed it against her body, and cinched her waist with her left hand. “Who knows, maybe you’ll run into an oldMalylover.”shut the suitcase with a slight thud and zipped it as loud as she could. “I’ll only be away for two weeks, no need to overpack.”

“You’re no fun,” Vanida said, stuffing the dress back in the closet. “I can’t believe you’re going to Beaverton without me. You couldn’t wait a few months? I should be able to get a little time off in October. Less people eat donuts in the fall, it’s a real thing.”

“Sorry.” Maly smiled. “But the doctor said my weak lungs could really benefit from some time in nature. The sooner the better. I’ll make sure to bring back some of your favorite Oregon apples, so you can make that applesauce you like so much.”

“Maly, you’re still here?” Arune, Vanida’s husband peeked his head into the room. He didn’t dare step foot inside. He was old-fashioned that way. Even though they all grew up in the same village, chased each other as children, he always set clear boundaries, and respected Maly’s room as a sacred space for the women in the family. The fact that his nose even made it past the door’s threshold, Maly knew, was his way of checking in, his way of making sure she was okay.

* *

“I only made it all the time because I thought you liked it.”

“We just finished packing,” Maly said. “Alright, well. I called Tina and she just left L.A.,” Arune said. He cleared his throat before adding, “I asked her not to speed during the trip.” He lingered a bit before waving a tentative hand in Maly’s direction. Maly and Vanida doubled over in laughter at this rare affection. * Tina arrived at 8:40 a.m., just as Vanida took off for the donut shop. Tina The Hopkins Review Volume 15, Issue 02, Spring 2022

“I’m just surprised Mom let you go is all.”

“Let me? Did you forget that I’m the older sister?” Maly scoffed, but inside her heart raced a little. Vanida was relieved that Tina had offered to come along on this trip. Tina was the only one who could afford to go anyway. After graduating from ucla in June, she announced that she’d take a gap year. No one knew what that meant, except that she seemed to have a lot of free time in the name of self-discovery. Maly drifted off, even with the air conditioner on full blast and Tina’s 90s pop blaring from both speakers. By the time she opened her eyes again, it was almost 6:00 p.m. They were already driving toward the entrance of a large apple orchard.

“Why Stockton?” Tina asked as she turned on the ignition.

“I have to return something to an old friend.” Tina turned to her, a slight suspicion in her eye, “We have FedEx for this sort of thing.”

put Maly’s luggage in the trunk and opened the passenger seat for her like a chauffeur. Maly eyed her for a moment before getting in but didn’t quite mind being treated with more kindness than usual.

“Which of your friends lives here?” Tina said, spinning around to take it all in. The property seemed to stretch for miles, the apple trees just a few feet away from the only home that stood on its grounds.

“Aunt Maly, are you sure this is the right address?” Tina made a tentative turn onto a dirt road, lined by endless rows of apple trees on both sides. Maly spotted a house ahead and nodded. This was it. It was everything he’d said he Whenwanted.they parked and Tina motioned to pop the trunk, Maly placed a hand on her shoulder to stop her. “We won’t be staying long.” Tina nodded and followed Maly to the front door of a large three-story farm home.

“Some things need to be returned in person.”

“A friend from Cambodia,” Maly said. She inhaled and filled her lungs with the fresh farm air, counting to 10 before knocking on his door three times. If she was lucky, he might not even be home. But she could hear the sound of laughter from inside, the sounds of family. A woman just a little younger than Maly answered the door. Unlike

Maly, who had allowed her hair to pepper, the woman had her hair fashioned in a perfect black perm, not a single flyway dared to escape its hair spray prison. She had deep burgundy lipstick over lips that smiled easily.

“Sorry I didn’t call ahead to let you know I was coming,” Maly said as she poured herself a cup of tea from the tray. “I wasn’t even sure you still lived“Werehere.”you in California all this time? The card you sent after my son’s birth was postmarked from Maine.”

“Sita, you remember my hometown friend. I’ve mentioned her before.”

“Hello,” the woman said in English. She looked from Maly to Tina, a question tilting the end of her sentence. Maly saw the warmth in the woman’s eyes as she realized they had the same tan in their complexion, a softness that rounded their features, and a slight sadness in their gaze that made their shared heritage unmistakable.

“That’s kind of you, but we really don’t want to intrude. I just came to The Hopkins Review Volume 15, Issue 02, Spring 2022

“We drive down at least twice a year to visit our kids— we’ll make sure to say hello next time.” It was quick, but Maly saw Sita jab her elbow ever so slightly into Samnang’s ribs. He placed a hand over Sita’s, patting it once in reassurance. “You two should stay for dinner. Sita is a marvelous cook.”

“I moved to Long Beach 15 years ago.”

“Hi, I’m looking for Samnang,” Maly said in Khmer, to save them both from their broken English. Before the woman could respond, Samnang was already behind her. “Maly?”The woman now looked at her with scrunched eyes, taking her in again with renewed focus, like a microscope.

“How could I forget.” Samnang led them to the living room, and Maly and Tina settled into the worn “Well,couch.thisis a surprise!” Samnang let out a nervous laugh as he took a seat across from them. He pushed his hair away from his face and widened his eyes, as if to make sure it really was her. When Sita came back with a tray of jasmine tea, she sat next to Samnang, thigh to thigh, and threw a possessive arm across the length of his shoulder.

When they walked far enough to feel the trees’ shadows cascade upon them, Samnang turned to plant a kiss first on her cheek, and when she did not turn away, he planted a second kiss on her lips. She didn’t know why she let him. Perhaps it was because she hadn’t been touched in so long. Just like their first kiss all those years ago, this kiss didn’t feel right. It never did. But she indulged and kissed him back until she recognized longing on his lips. It was then that she pulled back. “Sorry.” His face was red and flustered.

talk to you about something. It shouldn’t take very long.”

Samnang led Maly for a walk through the apple orchards. The sun was just starting to set, and the sky was the shade of a lotus petal against a clear lake. They hardly took 10 steps into the orchard before her right hand and his left hand found their way back to each other. It may have been over 30 years since they last saw each other, but for four of those years, he was her husband, and she was his wife. For four years, his hands kept her safe, and even now, she found comfort in his firm grip.

Sita hesitated for a moment, but then she looked from Samnang to Maly and smiled, her eyes warm again. She led Tina to the kitchen and shouted, “Dinner will be ready in 30 minutes.”

She pulled away, unzipped her coat pocket, and fished the gold ring from its depths. “I always meant to return this to you.” She placed the ring firmly at the center of his palm. “I don’t think it’s right for me to keep it.”

“Could you give us a moment?” Samnang looked at Sita with pleading eyes, “Perhaps Tina could help you in the kitchen.”

His fingers enveloped the ring. “Our marriage was real for me, you know. I’ve always considered you my first wife.” His head hung low, and when he looked up at her, he was 10 again. Her

“Out of respect for Sita, let’s not do that again,” she said, then she laced her right hand into his left and squeezed firmly, “this though, this is okay.”

“I always thought you’d come find me one day. I just never thought it would take you so long.” He pulled her into an embrace, and Maly wondered what her life would have been like if they had stayed husband and wife. But today affirmed what she always knew—they could never bring each other the happiness they both deserved.

* * *

next-door neighbor and best friend. The young boy who snuck her ripe apples from his mama’s farm. The teenager who raced her to the lake on blistering summer days. The 20-year-old gentle giant who slung pebbles at her suitors until there were none.

The Communists took over Cambodia when they were both 25, and they ended up in neighboring labor camps. Once they learned single men and women were being forced into marriages, they agreed to be husband and wife in name only. Maly wanted a love match and Samnang was the only man she trusted not to violate their agreement. While they were never physical, their intimacy was built on mutual trust, care, and protection.

“You will always be my only husband.” She took both of his hands in hers. “Thank you. Truly.” She understood the sacrifice he made when he left the ring in her possession. He gave her his only item of both sentimental and material value. The price of gold was never questioned. The ring gave her comfort in her worst moments. There were times in her life when she was so desperate, she nearly pawned it. But she always found a way out. She knew that one day, she wanted to return the ring to its rightful owner.

After spending the night in Samnang and Sita’s guestroom, Maly and Tina

Four years later, they escaped together to the Thai refugee camp alongside Vanida and Arune. The night they arrived, Samnang presented Maly with his mother’s gold ring and asked if she wanted to become husband and wife for real this time. It broke her heart to see the look on his face when she told him that she saw him as nothing more than a brother.When she packed up to move into her sister’s unit, she found the ring in the folds of her checkered krama scarf.

“Why was I never enough for you?” He asked her, one last time.

“I don’t know,” she said, as she released his grip.

If there was one thing she knew for sure, it was that he was the only man she’d ever wished she could will herself to love.

The Hopkins Review Volume 15, Issue 02, Spring 2022

“This is Aunt Maly.” Tina smiled. “She’s like a second mom. I’ve mentioned her before.”

fiction

“I never knew you had an ex-husband.”

“You never asked.” Maly yawned and shut her eyes, feigning sleep until it wasWhenreal. Maly opened her eyes again, they were already in Chinatown. Maly was relieved to see that Fong’s Dim Sum Palace wasn’t an upscale, new-age Asian restaurant where she was made to feel foreign. The restaurant was just the right size. There were eight round tables and only one was occupied with a five-person family. When no one stepped up to greet them, Maly and Tina seated themselves at the table farthest from the other customers, the two of them side by side at a table for six. Maly reached across the worn but clean white linen and grabbed two pairs of utensils. She gave them a good wipe before handing a pair to Tina.

rose at 8:00 a.m. to begin their drive to San Francisco’s Chinatown. It was Sunday and Tina wanted dim sum. As Tina drove, Maly watched the farmlands of Stockton turn into an urban landscape. She kept her eyes glued to the buildings and billboards, trying hard to ignore Tina’s gaze.

“Hi, welcome to Fong’s. I’m David and I’ll be your server this morning.” A tall man around Tina’s age approached them with red menus and a smile that disappeared little by little with each step he took toward their table. Tina took the menu without looking at his face.

“Would you spit it out already? I wanna nap,” Maly sighed.

“Who was that man?” Tina asked, alternating glances between Maly and the road ahead. “My ex-husband.”

“Tina?” The young man peered closer. “Are you following me?”

“Your family’s restaurant is open to the public, isn’t it?” Tina pushed a few strands of hair behind her right ear, the way she always did when she was“Yeah,nervous.of course,” David cleared his throat. “Is this your mom?” David asked, his voice a fraction softer. He took a notepad from his back pocket.

“Would you like anything to drink?”

“It’s nice to meet you, Aunt Maly. Tina has told me so much about you.”

“She’d like jasmine tea,” Tina said. When David disappeared to the back, Tina whispered, “Remember when I said stubbornness runs in the family? Well.” She gestured toward David.Once

“And I wish I had dim sum more Sundays these last few decades.” Maly refilled their teacups and they cheered and laughed again. They ordered more rounds of shu mai and ate until Maly needed to unbutton her pants. Even as they paid, Tina said nothing to David. David thanked Maly and nodded in Tina’s direction as they exited the restaurant.

“And very little about you,” Maly said in Khmer.

“I can’t remember the last time it was just you and me,” Tina said, as she too doused her shu mai in soy sauce and chili oil.

“Did you forget our fun times at the doctor’s office last week?”

“I’m glad you came,” Maly said, resting a palm over Tina’s hand.

“This looks delicious,” Tina said once David turned away. Maly noticed David’s small smile as he walked back to the kitchen.

fiction The

When David walked back to the kitchen, Maly saw how Tina’s eyes followed him.

In the car, Tina was slow to put on her seat belt, slow to put the key in Hopkins Review Volume 15, Issue 02, Spring 2022

“I only wish I came home more weekends these last four years.”

David returned with a pot of tea and two teacups, Tina pointed at various items on the menu. David nodded, a silent exchange that continued even when he brought out the dishes and laid them down one by one. Shrimp and pork shu mai, bbq pork buns, chicken feet, and egg tart filled the once empty round table.

Maly doused her shu mai in soy sauce and chili oil and half expected Tina to stop her—a campaign to lower the family’s salt and spice intake that had lasted five long years. But Tina just smiled and watched as Maly swallowed the shu mai whole.

“What’s that?” David asked.

Tina refilled their teacups to the brim. “Cheers to fun times,” she said, and they clinked their teacups like it was alcohol, and it might as well have been, the way they both threw their heads back and cackled afterward.

fiction

“That’s the thing, he was the best, until I tried to turn it into something it wasn’t.”“What do you want to tell him?”

Tina disappeared for a few minutes while Maly waited in the car. When she returned, she sat in silence for several seconds before bursting into laughter. “He said he missed me too, but only as a friend.” Tears rolled down her cheeks, but laughter filled the car.

Maly laughed too, as she pulled Tina into a hug and patted her back again and again, the way she used to whenever Tina hurt herself as a kid. Tina who was always so eager to embrace life she’d overlook the cracks in the ground, uneven pavement that sent her flying, knees scraping against cement, blood flowing, tears trickling. The pain never stopped Tina from getting back up, running faster toward the next thing that excited her.

“What do you say to someone who ghosted you?”

“What do you mean?”

“David was my best friend at ucla. We did everything together. We both majored in sociology. We even shared similar dreams to start a nonprofit for at-risk youth. Before graduation, I told him I liked him, and he completely stopped talking to me. He said he didn’t want to lead me on.”

“That I miss him.”

* *

“He doesn’t sound like a very good friend.”

“Then that’s all you need to say.”

At a little past noon, they began their 10-hour drive to Beaverton, Oregon to find the owner of the 25 letters, who in return possessed 25 letters written in Maly’s shaky handwriting.

One letter for each year they were apart. Each contained brief updates. A new job, the same job, a new kid in the family, and now in their old age,

And all the while Maly would sit on the sidelines, looking at Tina with a tinge of admiration. *

“Let’s keep going. I’m dying to find out—if that was your ex-husband in Stockon, who’s waiting for us in Oregon?”*** It had started with an accidental brush of gloved hand over gloved hand as Maly reached for a high-hanging fruit in Oregon’s apple orchards. Soon, it advanced to stolen glances from beneath wide-brimmed sunhats. Stolen glances became stolen kisses behind tool sheds during lunch breaks, their ungloved hands tracing lines on each other’s skin. And when they could afford it, stolen kisses gave way to stolen nights out of town in cheap motels.

“We could rest at a hotel if you’re tired,” Tina said, as she opened the passenger door for Maly.

When Maly and Tina arrived in Beaverton it was nearly 11 p.m. The address took them to a suburb where all the homes were identical two-story town houses with an attached two-car garage. In the darkness, the city was a purple haze lit by sparse streetlamps.

When Maly woke from her food coma, it was already five and Tina was pulling up at a Chevron. They used the restroom and patted water against their cheeks to freshen up. The dim sum still kept them full, so instead of stopping for a meal, they bought Slim Jims and sunflower seeds.

fiction The Hopkins Review Volume 15, Issue 02, Spring 2022

This went on for three blissful years over several planting seasons. They were paid meager wages, but their shared lunch breaks always made the job worthDuringit. their fourth year in Oregon, Maly watched her marry someone else. By the fifth year, she couldn’t take it anymore. Maly moved to Maine to live with a distant cousin and took a job in the fishpacking district. It was so cold in Maine, she hoped not being able to feel her face meant she would soon be unable to feel anything else. But just when she felt numb enough to move on, the letters began.

news of a loved one’s passing. Nothing more, nothing less. But Maly knew that what was not said, what was clear in the very sending and receiving of the letters, was a confirmation of continued affection.

“I’m okay if you are,” Maly said.

“What did I expect?” Maly sighed.

It may have been late, but Maly knew that if she didn’t do it now, she wouldn’t have the courage to come back tomorrow. Maly took a deep breath and walked toward the front door with Tina at her “Areheels.you sure we don’t need to take out our luggage? Last time you said that and . . .” Before Tina could finish her sentence and before Maly could even ring the doorbell, the door swung open. Out walked a woman with a blunt bob, flushed cheeks like she’d been running, and a wool coat over thin cotton pajamas. She closed the door behind her and peered closely into Maly’s eyes.

Maly brought her cell phone close to her face and shone a light on them “Whatboth.are you doing here?” Nora whispered this time. She looked from Maly to “Tina,Tina.can you wait in the car while I chat with my friend Nora?” Tina hesitated a moment before turning toward the driveway. Nora took Maly’s hand and led her not through the front door, but through a side gate that opened to a dimly lit garden. Even though there were lawn chairs, Nora didn’t stop until they were both inside the tool shed at the farthest corner of the backyard. She shut the door behind them and fumbled until she found the light switch.

When Nora didn’t stop her, Maly cupped Nora’s cheeks with both palms and pulled her in for a kiss. She was gentle at first, her lips coaxing Nora’s until both their lips clung to each other, until their tongues probed for an answer to a question neither of them ever verbalized. Maly leaned in with her

“We’re inside this time,” Nora said, a smile tugging at the corner of her lips. Maly reached out to brush Nora’s thinning hair away from her brow, to trace the new wrinkles on her familiar face. It may have been 25 years since they last met, but her eyes still shone with the same wonder. Her skin still lit up wherever Maly touched her.

fiction

“I thought I saw you through my security cameras, but I couldn’t believe my eyes.” Even in the darkness, Maly could see how Nora’s eyes widened in disbelief.“It’sme.”

“Do you really think so little of me?” Nora took a step toward Maly and reached out to rest a palm against her face. “I wrote because I missed you.”

Review Volume 15,

“We shouldn’t start something we can’t finish,” Nora said, but she didn’t pull Malyaway. kissed Nora’s palm once more before finally releasing her grip. “A little too late for that.” She laughed.

“You don’t know what I was willing to do for you.”

02, Spring 2022

“I just needed to know that we were okay. I couldn’t bear the thought that I’d hurt you.”

you the one who wrote to me?” Maly clutched one hand against her chest and with the other, she took the letters out from her purse and threw them on the ground in front of Nora’s feet.

The

Maly took Nora’s hand from her face and kissed the inside of her palm, tracing her lips across the taut skin until she reached the point where Nora’s love line and lifeline met.

When Nora finally pulled away it was not kind. She shoved Maly with a firm“Notforce.this again.” Nora’s voice was a fierce whisper. She placed her arms in a protective X in front of her, as if she had no part in the kiss. As if Maly was a Malymonster.felther chest throb, and she couldn’t tell what hurt more—Nora’s physical rejection, her own stubborn heart, or the cancer crawling through her “Weren’tlungs.

“So, you wrote to absolve yourself of guilt?”

“Don’t I, though? For three years, you were the one who led us behind fiction Hopkins Issue

“That’s not fair,” Maly said. “You married Boreth before I even had the chance.”“What were we going to do Maly? You were too scared to tell your family, and I couldn’t tell my parents that their only daughter was in love with a woman who was too afraid to even acknowledge her in public.”

“It’s a little too late for a lot of things,” Nora said. “Like how you’re finally knocking on my door after all these years.”

“Are you happy?”

“You think I’m alone because I’m strong?” Maly said. “I’m alone because the person I love is married to someone else.”

fiction

48 © 2022 Layhannara Tep Love Like Applesauce, Layhannara Tep sheds, drove us out of town for dates. And even after 25 years of writing, this is the first time you show up at my door. What do you want now that I’m happily married?”

“Because the next time you write, I won’t be able to answer.”

“Please don’t,” Nora said.

“We never could get our timing right,” Maly laughed. “If my niece knew, she’d say we were ahead of our time, the way we dared to do things no one dared to do back then.”

“I’m not you, Maly. I’m not strong enough to be alone.”

“You always had a way with goodbyes,” Nora said. Maly gathered the scattered letters into one neat bundle and placed them into Nora’s hands. “Please stop writing me.”

“Why?” Nora’s voice broke.

“Maybe we’re just not meant for this lifetime,” Nora said. And for the first time, Maly agreed with Nora. They could never happen in this lifetime. Maly wasn’t a particularly religious woman, but she was intrigued by the idea of karma and reincarnation. Why had she lived carefully all these years anyway, if not for a chance to be with Nora? If not in this lifetime, then perhaps in the next. Maly tried to imagine life with Nora but instead the world blacked out for a moment. When she opened her eyes again, she was sitting against the wooden wall of the shed, her head resting on Nora’s shoulder. “Are you okay?” Nora placed the back of her hand against Maly’s forehead to see if she was warm. But Maly was warm from something else. She pulled Nora in for what she knew would be their last kiss. So, she took her time probing each inch of Nora’s mouth, savoring the feel of their tangled tongues, memorizing the small gaps between her teeth. Her lips sought Nora again and again, in their own mini-eternity. Finally, Maly pulled away, slow and reluctant. “I think I’ve kept my niece waiting long enough.”

During the movie, Maly turned toward the wall so Tina couldn’t see the tears that streamed down her face. What did she expect coming all this way, anyway? For Nora to take her back? For Nora to love and care for her until the day she died?

“No, this is Beaverton Hospital. Seems like you had an episode in the hotel. I took the first flight out.” Vanida brushed Maly’s hair away from her brow and tucked a strand behind her ear. “Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked.

“Aunt Maly!” Tina put her book down and threw her arms around Maly. Maly looked from Tina to Vanida. “Are we back in Long Beach?”

That night, Maly and Tina checked into a hotel and got to spending Maly’s savings. They ordered room service for dinner and a bottle of wine and pints of vanilla ice cream for dessert. They even splurged on a Pay-Per-View showing of a rom-com starring Ryan Gosling.

“Maly, you’re up!” Vanida pressed a button to call the nurse. “You’ve been asleep for two days. We were so worried.”

fiction The Hopkins Review Volume 15, Issue 02, Spring 2022

Yeah, okay. Maybe there was a small part of her that hoped for something more. She just didn’t expect Nora to draw such clear lines when they had always operated in the gray. Why did this hurt more than when Nora married someone else? Why did this hurt even more than the thought of her own mortality?

Maly sobbed silently and clutched her chest. She didn’t know when she drifted off, but the wine must have put her in a deep sleep. She woke to a persistent beep, and her head wouldn’t stop ringing. When she lifted her right arm to reach for the alarm, she realized that it was hooked to an IV. When she tried to talk, she felt the breathing tube in her nose. And finally, when she tried to lift her left arm, she noticed that her left hand was laced firmly in the grip of another hand. Her gaze followed the arm to Vanida’s resting face. Vanida’s head leaned against a chair. When Maly looked around, she saw that they were enshrouded in blue hospital curtains. At the foot of her bed, Tina had her head buried in a book. She squeezed Vanida’s hand to wake her.

“Are you hungry? Thirsty?” Tina asked in a panic. “I’m gonna go find you something to eat.” Tina left the room before Maly could respond. “I didn’t want you to worry,” Maly sighed. “I’m always worried about you,” Vanida said. “I know, but I can handle this on my own.” Maly turned her face away from“ButVanida.you don’t have to,” Vanida’s voice cracked as she spoke. “You’re always so brave, but I’m scared to lose you.”

“Who said I’m not scared?” Maly said. Vanida pulled Maly in a familiar embrace. They were the same arms that welcomed Maly after she left Samnang in the refugee camp. The same warmth that enveloped their shared home in Beaverton, Oregon. And the same hug that pulled her back to the West Coast after her self-imposed exile in TinaMaine.walked into the room alongside the attending nurse, and Maly looked from Vanida to Tina as if she were seeing them for the first time.

After the nurse checked Maly’s vitals, Tina peeled back the aluminum cover off a snack pack and scooped a spoonful to feed Maly. The last thing Maly remembered before she drifted back to sleep was the sweet and tart taste of applesauce.

torrin a. greathouse Cripple Sex Manifesto

Unbutton your tongues; there are no metaphors here. A beast broke is—yes—broken. We limp, stumble into bed: Us, here, fucking is our bodies willing to break stigma passed down, seek to make unreasonable joy against a world without accommodations. a Cleave Tanka

Cripple Sex Manifesto, torrin a. greathouse poetry51

Forever ago, you taught me that the shortest distance between two strangers’ open mouths is a line of code, an education that fed me. I won’t forget you. Safety shaped from anonymity. Or all the laws passed to make targets of us. Each old link, a broken chain. Leading back to their claim: any tool or service can be misused. Our labor, our living—a liability. Our secret script—the way a turn of phrase, or dollar sign slipped easy into a name, can signify so much—a threat. To what? I couldn’t say. They say it’s to prevent trafficking. Strawman made from other crimes that ended you. That made my living a deadlier trade. Now, all that’s left: a dozen fictions vanished into a police file. A digital harbor—burned to ash.

© 2022 Jalynn Harris The Lump, Jalynn Harris poetry53Jalynn Harris The Lump the lump inside my heart ain’t light in fact i’m told it mightjust explode. love, longholdbeginwhowithenergizeduntil&thelonging.myuponlife.mythesistheofyoungthelightoldilistliestheliarsiamire.couldtomelikethe day? thelonging.bird sits on a wire & weighs it down. weighting. the wire remembers it’s a wire.

The sterling of my words thisweighnagging need for nuance & nunnery. I am simple. Not a saint nor a siren nor even quite so certain I tell my story & keep bringing people back to praise me. The line holds this load to laugh a little more lightlyhow good it is to have weight. To go another round of balancing my call-to-worship sounds I praise my pen. O sweet channeling.mysterious

My sterling sings. my heart jolts the living room of my life lights.

Stations: On Eric Gill and the Poetics of Stone + 1 + W e begin with the rules of the form: the words must be cut with fair attention to the punchline. Craft determines that the letterer and the punchcutter are not of the same character. Patience determines the craft of both: Of patience there is this to be said. To be patient is to suffer. By their fruits men know one another, but by their sufferings they are what they are. And suffering is not merely the endurance of physical or mental anguish, but of joy also. A rabbit caught in a trap may be supposed to suffer physical anguish: but it suffers nothing else. The man crucified may be supposed to suffer physical & mental anguish, but he suffers also intense happiness and joy. The industrialist workman is often simply as a rabbit in a trap; the artist is often as a man nailed to a cross. In patience souls are possessed. No lower view of the matter will suffice. (Eric Gill, An Essay on Typography)

Stations: On Eric Gill and the Poetics of Stone, Heather H. Yeung essay55

Of patience we call to attention the following: Gill Sans Gill Cameo Perpetua Golden Cockerel Roman Hague and Gill Joanna Monotype Joanna Aries Solus Jubilee Bunyan Floriated Capitals Gill Shadow Line. It is easy to write in the work of Eric Gill. Each day in this process of attention or attenuation I walk up onto the moor above my house in search of fresh air. I live in a place where trees do not grow easily, so windbreaks between portions of land are fashioned in stone, stone walls I walk along.

+ 2 + How many prisoners notice the quality of the material that limits their point of view at a level more than the perception of their physical discomfort? We might remark the coolness or heat of wall or floor, its darkness or light, its basic texture. . . .Yet once freed, how many will be perpetually affected in their encounters with the same material that was also used to form the prison walls?

Heather H. Yeung

Stations: On Eric Gill and the Poetics of Stone, Heather H. Yeung essay

The stone taxonomized under this name is itself various. Whether “light,” “dark,” “marbled,” or whorled with the smallest of fossils, the voids in the limestone are filled by recrystallized calcite, and, as a whole, the stone reliable. Because it is hard, it is used as curbing in the Peaks, as interior flooring in public buildings. Because it is hard, its surface can be polished to a shine, and because of this plastic quality in particular, there was a time when the stone was mis-sold as marble. This has for a century now been rectified. We continue to polish the stone.

I have been struggling to write about the work of Eric Gill; in the writing is the discomfort. There is something at the side of the frame that I can’t see, a known secret of unprimed canvas, as it were. This either produces the impetus to write or has precipitated the struggle. Gill was not, first and foremost, a painter. Nor was he, first and foremost, a typographical artist. Gill worked in and with stone. In his first philosophical investigation, Wittgenstein develops the basis of a “primitive language”: engrossed in the act of building, A (master) calls out, and B (apprentice) brings the required stone. Repeat at each station until the wall is fully formed. + 3 + Yes, I have been struggling with stone, but now know to focus in on this most fluid of materials. Begin again: Hoptonwood is a limestone of peculiar qualities. The eye unknowing and walled in by certain expectations of Hoptonwood and its implications creates visual myths, which we not seeing how we see them tacitly, even unknowingly, accept. Such immured vision prevents our noticing the true nature of the stone. This is to write that Hoptonwood, quarried in the Peak District of Derbyshire and of a characteristic gray-cream hue, is a usefully hard stone. It is therefore favored in Britain for carving and sculpture of an indigenous, decorative variety.

Through our memory of stones perceived but unnamed, the grave. This is a vision immured by stone rows in Hoptonwood’s cream-gray gesturing towards and against sky, the matter of the world’s mouth, its teeth.

Hoptonwood is generally popular for gravestones, memorials, monuments. What we assume is a darker Portland is usually Hoptonwood. We learn analogy by rote. In our postwar mind we see in all instances of Hoptonwood the murmur of innumerable bodies dead and without names.

In my mouth I carry stones terribly, as B carries to A, and spit them out.

+ 5 +

Hoptonwood’s aesthetic resonance must always now bear with it our Hopkins 15,

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+ 4 +

One hundred twenty thousand Commonwealth graves are carved from Hoptonwood, with the stones shipped from Derbyshire to France and Belgium and installed. Pulled teeth in uniform rows planted in fenced-off fields, the lettering design by the brother of Eric, Max Gill: Exigi monumentum aere perennius | regalique situ pyramidum altius | quod non imber edax, non aquilo impotens | possit diruere aut innumerabilis | annorum series et fuga temporum.

I learned the full ode by heart as a punishment for a childhood misdemeanor long forgotten, along with the final lines of the ode, or any accurate, even serviceable, translation. Right now this doesn’t seem to matter terribly: what does is the weight, or heft, of the Latin syllables I carry with me and to which I apprentice myself, and the dust of the desert. The words, complete to a point, form in the mouth what they call out as their interior, monumental performance. A thing from a larger thing that guides and obscures my readings of elegy, of monument, of aesthetic, cultural, or political acts of commemoration and restitution.

The

With every surface we dust, we remove the dust into the atmosphere. A strange metamorphosis of verb to noun. Deliberate obscurantism. We tie back our hair against it even though we know it is pervasive.

Around every gravestone, each plaque, curbstone, or sculpture, there is an aura of dust—the dust that the stone loses in its reformation as an aesthetic object to be held in the eye. But here, it is the air that is set in relief against the dust; it is the stone in this environment liquid, but we will not see it again until the dust settles, by which time it will be different. We don’t choke, are suspended. The body in dust is set, and it is the form that moves, demands a rigorous memory work.

Stations: On Eric Gill and the Poetics of Stone, Heather H. Yeung sense of what war means, its standard memorial work working on memory in strange ways.

Between and after the wars of 1914 and 1939, for similar plastic reasons, Hoptonwood sees use in carving and sculpture. There is a list that goes on but may start with Hepworth, and move through Moore, McWilliam, Epstein, to Gill, with an abundance of rubble pile cairns of offcuts between. Many of these names cut between sculpture and carving between art and monument their figures move. In a sense, the list goes backwards. In a sense, it isn’t really a list at all, but a row, a wall. + 6 + A courtyard: the maquettes are plasterwork. Stone carving lets dust settle anywhere, hang in the air between the sheltering walls, dust in the spaces of the stone store where different sizes are seasoned before use, dust boxed into the studio whose windows are thrown open to the light. The necessary tools are well worn and well cared for, placed close at hand. The light illuminates the density of dust and through the dust movement: eyes and hands in concert with each other and in search of form with the body that holds them forgotten.

And, lest we forget, this is a durable stone.

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The art of sculpture requires 360-degree vision and more: height, depth, time, weathering—the full circular. The imagination of how patination will work after the sculptor’s death in different landscapes, and how each unanticipated viewer will approach the work anew. The invitation to touch must be as strong as the invitation to step back and take a prospectus. The myth is created from all angles and exposed. Stone being, lest we forget, the most fluid of media.

I submit that it is difficult to see work graven in Hoptonwood without the graves, the monuments, in mind; I view each singular work of art from the requisite multiple angles, rolled around in rocks and stones that are also Hoptonwood; I am still and am still missing something, but vow to be patient and let the work unfold around me. + 8 +

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In the work of the chambered cairn are the same angles of vision as the studio view: our angles of vision enacted in stone. The walls constructed from B to A. The cairn exists monumentally, perhaps turfed over with time passing vision over centuries. An archaeological imaginary assumes its hollow center is a norm, the paths ascending to the place abandoned excepting what is hidden there, the father’s gift to a daughter.

Set off from the clouds of dust in an atmosphere rarefied, the design of most modernist artists’ formal or “display” studios incorporated a viewing platform. Thus we look down on the work in stone.

As its viewer, we, too, must attempt the dance of these many degrees, and in poor mimicry of the sculptor’s own search, emerge sometimes from the myopia of dust.

+ 7 +

Who, now, chooses to play Creon’s role? We have heard his judgement translated a thousandfold, the punishment for the pouring of libations, the essay Hopkins 15,

60 © 2022 Heather H. Yeung Stations: On Eric Gill and the Poetics of Stone, Heather H. Yeung renegade mourning, the shrouding of what has been forcibly unshrouded in dust. And yet I write it again, here: ἄγων ἔρημος ἔνθ᾽ ἂν ᾖ βροτῶν στίβος κρύψω πετρώδει ζῶσαν ἐν κατώρυχι, φορβῆς τοσοῦτον ὡς ἄγος μόνον προθείς, Through the dust, then, immurement beyond city bounds. In this father’s voice, different-tongued Horace exigi monumentum . . . and different-tongued Gill of patience there is this to be said. . . . The word as gesture rules, and gesture, by decree, is set in stone. Or the daughter. A body starves to bone dust. The cairn enacts in solid form the 360, which now cannot observe the progress of the body inside. She is the sculpture we seek but can never see. Center point of a different world, its protective heaven-bowl made of stone, she is indifferent to our roving perspective. Roll the door-stone. Crack open this egg. Disturb what you will that is immured, engraved. I walk on eggshells, destroying domes, tombs, tomes. The dust falls for all of us differently. + 9 + There is a painting by Vanessa Bell that I have stored in my memory as a talisman. Interior with Artist’s Daughter rattles around in the tomb my skull. The interior of the image is a view into a moment at infamous Charleston. A vase. Flowers. Prints. Books. Scissors and a spool of lightcolored thread, the figure of the “Artist’s Daughter.” It is the figure’s curved line of inattention that compels. The curve of this line sits in a technically insignificant part of the frame in profound indifference to the process of creation it is formed from and forms. The work exists starkly in two dimensions; the figure forces such depression of the planes. essay

+ 10 +

These lines again in a sketch by Eric Gill, from Eliz (dated the third of April, 1927). But this is stark. What surrounds the figure is blank paper. But again, on a chair with the head resting on the left arm and the right arm slack the line has been configured. Again, the daughter or figure or line looks down, utterly uninterested in any process external to the body or the external effects of the body itself. The “interior” of both images is what is important and what we cannot see: the woman whose line invites one to look beyond the board and see what is there. Chalky fingermarks on paper. And scattered in our turning to the blank back of the image, dust. Which we will accidentally breathe in.

Relief carving and lettering are demonstrably different modes of vision in stone than is sculpture, even if some of the tools, and the range in size of monument, are shared.

Relief carving shares with any paper or canvas-based mark-making a reliance on a mostly two-dimensional vision, but it can at the same time create true shadow through real (if shallow) manipulation of depth in the stonework.You can almost see the fingerprints. It teeters on the border of enactment and illusion and falls off on the opposite side to the woodcut printing plates. We wade through and breathe in dust in the atmosphere of the carver’s working studio and stone yard, but do not bathe in it to the same degree, even if the stone being carved is shared with the sculptor in some way, even if the artist is the same. Elements of the wider perspective have been lost. Portland, Hoptonwood, Kilkenny Blue; look closer but avoid the full 360, repeating at each station.

essay The Hopkins Review Volume 15, Issue 02, Spring 2022

It is important for this and any via that it is the flatness of the image which forces prayer; the numbers and lettering need only be remarked inasmuch as they act as a reminder to the ritual habit. (In a way they are a castigation one should not need to consult them at all). In the 10th station as in the third, Gill’s body is transubstantiated into that of Christ, carved by himself, the artist, in stone.

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Stations: On Eric Gill and the Poetics of Stone, Heather H. Yeung + 11 + Westminster. The smell of cold stone, of waiting: standing waiting to greet or be seated or in the act of incredulous pronouncement or witness, kneeling waiting, waiting to stand, and so in waiting seeking a mode of passing time which is not a parodic approximate performance of invocation or prayer.TheAbbey marks my most prolonged encounters with any of Gill’s relief carving work. Each time my body rises and falls in false genuflections I find myself in some form of contemplation of the Via Crucis.

The self of the via is one turned in upon itself in an act of painful interiority, the body as flat as the icon that has provoked such patience, such difficulty, such joy. The body at the meeting point of the two lines that comprise the cross must exist under the rule of a stoniness renewed at each station.

For Gill, the via is a walk of protest and a warning against the “iniquities” of the rising capitalist society, the industrial age, and warmongers. In Hoptonwood, there is to the postwar viewer the stony intimation of the war’s breath.

The 14 stations carved in bas-relief in Hoptonwood stone between 1914 and 1918 measure five feet and eight inches square were delivered to the cathedral thus 10, 2, 13, 5, 4, 3, 6, 7, 8, 9, 12, 14. Dedicated on Good Friday 1918. All panels “finished” in place. The 11th was the final to be delivered, as by request of John Marshall it had been recarved.

Spring

In a long period spent together in Wales, Jones apprenticed himself to Gill. Thus, the cover pages for that great poem, The Anathemata, meticulously laid out as the catalog of names on a monument. Each stroke must be meticulously placed, since there is total exposure in the letterer’s line of any mistake (in the case of which, the whole work must be discarded, begun again). In the mosaic pretensions of the lettering, the hint always that behind the relief is a tablet that is in turn a law. Jones and Gill cast themselves as the figure of the artist. Both Jones and Gill are steadfast in upholding beliefs which, even in a godless world, are akin to the act that precipitates not an upholding, but, as at the mill with slaves, a crashing down of temple walls.

A calls to B, demands genuflection. There is in Jones a companion of sorts in my difficult work on Gill. Jones writes of Gill’s pioneering work in the promotion of direct carving—the art of “cutting direct into the stone” without the use of preliminary models, templates, or pointing: the act of raising above the vision of the artist the potential held in the material itself. Each figure, each letter, an icon.

Who, after walking by walls, would bear to return to the cairn? Hopkins 15, Issue 02, 2022

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supreme. There the workman scaled the heights of pure form, and some of his inscribed stones possess the anonymous and inevitable quality we associate with the works of the great civilizations, where an almost frightening technical skill, for a rare moment, is the free instrument of the highest sensitivity—and the Word is made Stone. (Epoch and Artist)

Welsh poet David Jones, Gill “as a carver of inscriptions”:...stands

The first tablets were brought down from the mountain and smashed to dust with and because of the icons. The second—replacements—brought down once the dust had commingled or settled, haunt what is yet called WesternForCivilization.thegreat

+ 14 + In 1924, Jones painted The Garden Enclosed, himself figured and forcing a kiss in the right-hand side of the frame. Flowers fall from the left hand of Petra Gill, whose left arm is slack, as the right arm escapes in tension behind the Enclosed,head.Jones takes violent form from himself and Gill’s daughter. Gill modeled his figures on himself, and also took form, lines, from his daughters in parallel to their sexual violation. Both Jones and Gill with Gill’s daughter Petra. Gill with both daughters.

+ 13 +

For the maker trapped in the valley of stone there are two options. The first, to turn back. The second, to bend his craft to his will. There is a violence to the gendering of this expression, violence to the patience of work in stone. A calls out to B; B passes the stone down the mountain or up to the cairn walls.

The nature of letters or scratches in stone? If the walls are forced open, we see the play of light, and reach out to touch, feel the difficult frictions in our fingertips’ relation to their nails, feel in this friction the stone become enclosure,Perhapsform.the most striking thing about the Westminster stations is that the lettering beneath each piece is rubricated, the numbering in an approximation of a typesetter’s black. In their direct call to medieval habits of illumination and annotation of the devotional book, they trick the eye into assuming they are important. If you trace with your fingers too long, these letters will bleed, hugging close to the punchline. But in the via, the law of the word is immaterial.

Compare, now, the portraits of the artists’ daughters; our stations. The passion become violate, the body crucial, a work in dust, essay

Stations: On Eric Gill and the Poetics of Stone, Heather H. Yeung

essay The Hopkins Review Volume 15, Issue 02, Spring 2022

Walk again the via, see how A calls out to B; B passes the stone. See how we cannot distance ourselves from the work in stone, how close we come to being immured for the scattering of dust, our hasty ritual.

What is the scale of patience in the work of abuse? Of patience there is this much to be Petra, partly carved into the sandstone rockface is the “Rose City.” She is accessed via a geological fault line where there was, once, an archway. From thence, cliffs rise in rubricate enclosure. Petra taken directly from Ancient Greek is stone. ءارتبلا

Although Kim is classified as a Modernist, the label is most appropriate for the early part of his career. After a stint translating Rabindranath Tagore and Sarojini Naidu, Kim—circa 1925, under the sway of an increasingly complicated political scene—deserted the theories and aesthetics of the West that defined his early work, and turned to classical Chinese literature and the folk songs of his country, at which point his own poetry transitioned from the overtly innovative rhythms of

Kim Ok introduced by Ryan Choi

Translated from the Korean & Introduced by Ryan Choi B orn in 1896 in the North when it was just the “north,” in the twilight of the Joseon Dynasty, which had thrived for over five centuries as the last in a long line of kingdoms, Kim Ok was an early Modernist poet, literary translator, and editor. Beyond these endeavors he was known as a secondary school teacher, freelance lecturer, and administrator at the Gyeongseong Central Broadcasting Company (the predecessor of the modern Korean Broadcasting System). A gifted linguist who lived through Korea’s modernization, as well as its colonization and eventual liberation from Japan at the end of the Second World War, he was sent to study at Keio University in Tokyo in 1913, which was common for the Korean academic elite of the time. Notable for being among the first literary translators to work from original texts, Kim was capable in a range of languages beyond his own—Japanese, Chinese, English, French, and even Esperanto—introducing to the Korean language Western literary theory in his essays, as well as English and French Symbolist poetry in Dance in Agony (1921), a landmark anthology of 84 translations of poems by Paul Verlaine, Remy de Gourmont, Charles Baudelaire, W. B. Yeats, and more. This volume, together with Kim’s essays and foreign-inspired poetry, would become a catalyst for the Modernist movement in Korean poetry, which was defined as much by the assimilation of Western aesthetics like free verse and the extension of subject matter beyond Chinese-influenced folk themes (of love and nature, moral and historical pedagogy) as by the rise of Japan, which— having replaced China as the portal to the outer world—would act as both model and foe for Korea, being on the one hand the occupying power but on the other the first country in the region to modernize successfully. Many of the Korean intellectual luminaries who had gone, like Kim, to study in Japan during this era were impressed by Japan’s achievements in everything from basic infrastructure to university academics, and returned home with a vision for the same in their homeland. (By this point in time, Japan had translated a substantial amount of the Western canon, both classical and contemporary. Japan was also up to date in the physical and social sciences, mathematics, medicine, architecture, engineering, law, philosophy, and most other standard areas of academic study.)

The elder Kim would be a lifelong mentor to the younger, until the latter’s death by suspected suicide, and was instrumental in the publication and promotion of his works. Unlike his student, however, Kim Ok would not meet the same acclaim. In the latter part of his career, which overlapped with the last days of the occupation, Kim was an active member in a pro-Japanese literary organization, and also authored pro-Japanese labor songs and promoted Japanese culture and literature at a time of heightened Korean nationalism. Because of these activities, Kim Ok’s poetry remains blacklisted today across the entire Korean peninsula. As recently as 2002 he had the ignominious distinction of being memorialized in the Dictionary of Pro-Japanese Collaborators, compiled by the National Issue Research Center, and was included in the list of 705 traitors released by the Presidential Committee for the Inspection of Collaborations for Japanese Imperialism The circumstances of his death are mysterious: kidnapped by agents of the Kim (Il-Sung) regime in 1950 during the Korean War, Kim Ok was last recorded living in 1958 at a farm collective in North Korea.

—Ryan Choi

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“Memories,” “With Moon”) to styles and themes indebted to tradition (see: “Cosmos,” “When It Snows”). Also key to this change in subject and tone was a relationship Kim had made as a teacher at the Osan Middle School, where his pupil was Kim Sowol (1902–1934), another gifted student sent to study in Japan, who would posthumously become one of the most celebrated poets of the 20th century in Korea, famous for his only book Azaleas (1925), which is still taught in schools today as an exemplar of modern Korean verse. Osan Middle School was a Christian school, eventually closed by the Empire of Japan (but later reopened and still standing today) for the purpose of limiting the influence of Christianity and inculcating in the Koreans a reverence for the Japanese emperor. In these circumstances, Christianity became a key point of cohesion for the Korean Independence Movement, and it is partly for this reason that it maintains until this day a foothold in South Korean society and identity. Relatedly, during this same period, communism was also making its own inroads into Korea, amassing a similarly devoted following in the face of condemnation by Japan.

Note: a different version of this introduction appears in The New Criterion. The Hopkins 15, 2022

his youth (represented in the following selection by “Prelude to ‘Dance in Agony,’”

Issue 02, Spring

68 Prelude to “Dance of Agony” [1921], Kim Ok, trans. Ryan Choi

Kim Ok Prelude to “Dance of Agony” [1921]

“Life is born of Death . . . only to return in the end.” Who knows of the flames of agony that burn within the cries of the living, who know only weeping, through song and dance and

LettheaboundsthatsalvesTheamidstandConsiderlonging?ceaselessourNature’ssecretmarksofpain,seekbuttheglimmersofpleasurethetransientwoes.red—lipsandwineandclouds,inourlifelongdancewiththeFigureofAgony,fragrantSouthernbloomthatwithLight,Melody,Harmony,andRhythmofDreams—usdrinkandentertheLandofSleep,

69 the lofty dreams ofcscentedfrankincense-hildhoodbliss. But alas, only in the Land of cofandLegendtheKingdomMyththisanbe. translation The Hopkins Review Volume 15, Issue 02, Spring 2022 © 2022 Ryan Choi

70 Memories [1923], Kim Ok, trans. Ryan Choi Kim Ok Memories [1923] What we call occurshistory at the edge of

InclaimingourofofislifeWhathomecomingfweepingbelief,orourglory.wecallonlymemory,andallmemoryistheresiduedreams—apastthathangsitselffromlimbs,ourbodyasitsown.theend,lifeisapassingdream,andeverydream

72 With Moon [1923], Kim Ok, trans. Ryan Choi Kim Ok With Moon [1923]

Drowsy, warmed by lamplight— Boredom at night in the city— Encircled by piles of snow, I—a trail of Footprints ends in an endless field of Behold:snow. The snowfall slows—the winding Flakes, like small white flames, settle And melt on the great night sea . . . Drowsy, in the quiet dark streets— Boredom at night in the city— The moon on its indolent stroll, and the lamplights, Nodding off to sleep, like long forgotten dreams.

73Three Flower Songs, Kim Ok, trans. Ryan Choi Kim Ok Three Flower Songs

III. Garden Balsam [1923]

I. A Lingering Scent [1923]

II. Cosmos [1929] Only the white cosmos bloom, crying In dread of the cold autumn wind, The rusting scenes of loss and grief. I hold your hand, soft As a baby—the flower’s supreme delicacy.

But the scent is far too faint for the blooms To ever be trustworthy.

Flowers of delight—fall with ease, Conceal the scent of eternal doom.

On a cool somber noon— Smiling coyly in their midst, you Hang your head in commiseration With today (yet another) passing all too soon. Bright red blood red flowers.

Bright red blood red flowers, fier y and immense

74 Nights in Andong [1923], Kim Ok, trans. Ryan Choi Kim Ok Nights in Andong [1923]

All night it snows on the city of Andong. Tonight, lying on the powdered snow I watch the snowfall white against the black, the flames of the streetflittinglamps throughwhitely the night, the workers downclopping the shovelingstreetssnowintomounds.

75 I lie there watching the faint white flames—themore I look thethedimmeryseem.

In theAndong,snowswarms over the earth— In

raintheIntheAndong,lampflamesflickabovethestreets—Andong,nightdarkensinmygazeandthetearsforeverinmyheart.

When I see snow falling on The mountains and fields, I’m reminded of an age before I knew of the cruelties of the world, Those tales I heard on winter nights as a child long ago—

And then, there is Almighty God, The Father, poised in his solitary life in the clouds with the sun and silver moon, Who watches us in our sins and grace— and through trial and blessing, Preserves the world as such in peace. But how many years have passed Since I left my home to wander? Even with no mirror, I feel the wrinkles settling in my face; I must bury this worldly life—but How attached I remain to this body’s sufferings.

The mountain birds which soar, singing the praises of these noble beings, As the fishes stitch a course unseen through the blue and open sea.

Where is the divine Mountain Spirit Kim Ok

Of the divine Mountain Spirit

And the Dragon King who rules the sea, reigning over the world as they have for all eternity—

76 When It Snows [1941], Kim Ok, trans. Ryan Choi

And the Dragon King who rules the sea?

Even Almighty God has revealed the essence of his self to me.

The sky stands empty over earth— I soar through it on a plane, As the land and the seas stretch serenely below me. Today, no matter where I gaze, The sky is all but blue. Somewhere, an old woman picks up her grandchild. Up north, stacks of wood sit in snow the entire evening— As, in the end, my story will repeat.

the moon fixes at us the circular visor behind the eye of a sniper the glass car window still nearby trees and electricity poles run like a herd I heard my mother might want to speak to me or maybe it was a dream over here the days run scared like big game there however many light seconds away nothing moves a mobile static in pursuit of me the moon has her own way of revealing herself she leaves the view -er to fill what is missing I cover her with my thumb make her move around me c losing my eyes in turn on the base of my nail a lunula my own little moon I wonder all this time did I see some discarded c lipping or the missing hemi- -sphere

mytellIoneyessquintinwardtheyunshieldedfightingturnIhisthinkIcan’tasIrunfingersthrough his hair now close them bebe fecha os olhos

© 2022 Ananda Lima óculos, Ananda Lima poetry79Ananda Lima óculos after lights out it occurs to me I can squint my way through the world but he hands me his glasses I think lens cracked on the ground picture concrete, picture bully picture t-rex the movies when I was the child I tell him to close his eyes keep them from us clay figures in the darkness from each other from

Of green on brown, her sensible brown coat. But on her head, that fusty fascinator! Who knows what makes a partnership? Do we? Her understatement, his hyperbole.

Is his bedizened gimcrack just for her, Who seems to us so dowdy and demure? She must have something else, that is not his, Beholder in whose eye his beauty is.

The parched peahen approaches, beak agape,

To drink out of the cat bowl. Let her drink. Let us consider her who seems to shrink Beside his dazzle, though she shares his shape. Who is the artist? Who the imitator?

Look now—the oily sheen about her throat

Wayne Thiebaud (1920–2021) In Memoriam, Karen Wilkin

Thiebaud’s name is synonymous with a celebration of vernacular American foodstuffs—slices of pie and cake, the contents of deli counters, gumball machines, ice-cream cones—the kind of thing ubiquitous across the continent, presented with brilliantly lit, seductive physicality and crisp simplicity that teeters on the brink of abstraction. Paintings of this type established Thiebaud’s reputation and remain his most familiar works, but they are only part of what has engaged him for more than eight decades. He was an even more adventurous and wide-ranging painter than these now-iconic images suggest. Witness his powerful images of vertiginous cityscapes, tangles of highway, river-laced landscapes, and frighteningly steep mountains and cliffs, images no more literal than the paeans to diners and delis, yet just as evocative of specific places and particular qualities of light, weather, season, and time of day as the pie and cake paintings are of a certain kind of American food served in certain kinds of settings. Like the pie and cake paintings, the landscapes and city views were done in the studio, informed by memory, but firmly rooted in intense observation and occasional drawings. Like the foodstuff images, the landscapes and city views are richly colored and sensuously painted, with layered transparencies and translucencies taking the place of sweeps of luxuriously thick pigment. But this is only part of the story. From the very beginning of his working life, Thiebaud painted the figure. “It’s the most interesting thing to do,” he says, “and the most difficult.” A surprisingly assured and accomplished head of a fisherman, painted in 1936, is testimony to the abilities of the future artist as a precocious 14-year-old. “Eighty-seven years later,” Thiebaud said, “I’m still trying to paint the figure. The figure is really impossible, unless you’re Velázquez. Everything is so subtle but, because we

Wayne Thiebaud (1920 2021) In Memoriam

hen Wayne Thiebaud died on Christmas Day, 2021, aged 101, one month, and 10 days, we lost a national treasure—a brilliant and original painter, an incisive draftsman, a compelling teacher, and a terrific tennis player, all of it until the very last weeks of his long, productive life. Thiebaud’s generosity to his fellow artists and his students was legendary, as was his dedication to working in his studio. “What are you doing to celebrate?” I asked him, when I phoned him on his 100th birthday. “I’m doing what I like best,” he said. “I have a brush in my hand.”

81art

Karen Wilkin

Wayne Thiebaud (1920–2021) In Memoriam, Karen Wilkin art live in it, we have a special sense of how it is. The figure is an incredible challenge.” Over those 87 years, Thiebaud rose to that challenge by exploring the possibilities of the “impossible” subject in just about every guise, working from life, rather than from memory, as he did with his better-known subjects. He filled notebooks with drawings of people casually encountered and observed, unawares, in commonplace situations, worked from models in the studio, and painted his friends, family, and himself, along with the occasional commissioned portrait. In his last years, there were invented figures of an unexpected type. Unlike his paintings of other subjects, Thiebaud’s figures were always done from observation. Sitting for him was apparently arduous. “Most people I paint are friends or relatives or fellow painters,” he said. “But they’ll only pose once.” The protagonists of Five Seated Figures (1965) sat together for about 10 days, a proximity that is belied by the way that painting’s two women and three men are all seemingly lost in their own thoughts, while, at the same time, appearing to consciously present themselves for scrutiny. They seem locked into a kind of contradictory self-conscious introspection, remaining aware of the artist’s presence but not of each other’s. No one looks at anyone else. The two women turn away from one another. The tense affect, heightened by the dynamics of a composition in which the upper two-thirds of the painting is far denser and more full of incident than the lower third, completely subverts the apparently straightforward situation depicted and makes the painting both uncanny and unforgettable. That Thiebaud required his models to sit for 10 days may account for the sense that they have withdrawn into themselves, perhaps as a kind of self-protection.

Although figures are absent from the great majority of Thiebaud’s work, human presence is often implied. The foodstuff paintings turn the viewer into a surrogate customer, a potential consumer standing before a diner display case or a deli counter. His dizzying cityscapes, inspired by San Francisco’s steep hills and roadways, are improvisations on engineering and human habitation, while his paintings of the watery landscapes near Sacramento, where he lived for most of his life, and Davis, where he taught for decades, include disciplined farmland and cultivated trees. His looming mountains are sometimes minutely populated and, perhaps more

significantly, were intended, Thiebaud said, not to be about what mountains look like, but “about how they make you feel.” “Watching people going about their activities is very attractive for me,” he often said. His delight in observing people in ordinary situations first translated into lively cartoons and caricatures—he even worked briefly for Disney, as a young man—and some of that antic spirit surfaces in his paintings from time to time, without compromising their seriousness. It may have something to do with his late paintings of clowns.

The Hopkins Review Volume 15, Issue 02, Spring 2022

Asked what prompted the series, Thiebaud laughed. “There’s no explanation,” he said. “It was a lark.” He acknowledged, however, his recollections of working for the circus when he was a teenager—carrying water for elephants and spreading sawdust—as well as his fondness for Henry Miller’s short novel The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder. The book is, on one level, the story of a famous clown who wishes not merely to make people laugh, but to give them lasting joy, and on another, a tale of yearning, sacrifice, and fulfillment. Originally intended to accompany a series of drawings of clowns and circuses by Fernand Léger, the story was rejected by the artist and published separately. While it is impossible to link any of Thiebaud’s clowns directly to Miller’s text, the notably unsentimental but sympathetic mood of the story seems palpable in the lushly painted, playful but intensely serious canvases of the unmistakably American performers. The motif allowed Thiebaud to reprise his early interest in cartooning and caricature, with its concomitant allusion to the absurdity of being human. While he usually avoided suggestions of narrative, the clown paintings are full of open-ended implications that make us speculate on what led up to the image before us and on the image’s possible aftermath. In Clown and Beast (Study) (2016), with its schematically striped tiger neatly pinning a clown in a striped jersey to the ground, we wonder whether we are witnessing affection or play or violence. The orderly poses and the tiger’s housecat-like affect suggest benign compliance, but we cannot be certain. The gorgeous paint handling distracts us from thoughts of disaster. Despite the specificity of Thiebaud’s subjects and the rich associations they provoke, his paintings depend upon a subtext of abstract geometry, often reinforced by shadows that can even compete with the nominal

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Wayne Thiebaud (1920–2021) In Memoriam, Karen Wilkin subject for attention. The shadows can seem to have a life of their own, almost independent of the objects or forms that presumably generate them, an autonomy that intensifies the suggestion of strong artificial lighting and reinforces inherent abstractness of the image. In many of Thiebaud’s pie paintings, the repeated shadows between the neatly arranged portions are as visually significant as the triangles and slanted bars of the pie slices and the arcs of the plates on which they sit. We recognize, with pleasure, the familiar vernacular desserts presented to us, identifying the neat wedges as lemon meringue, pumpkin, Boston cream, and cherry. But we are equally caught up in the painting’s nonassociative, all-over two-dimensional structure of circles, triangles, and bold strokes, laced together by disjunctive, brilliantly colored drawing. Against this complexity, the rhythmic basso continuo of the shadows, with their contrasting cool hues, also accentuates the broadly stroked Euclidean construction of the pie slices and unifies the entire composition. Shadows play a similar role in Thiebaud’s figure and clown paintings, anchoring, contradicting, and sometimes all but overwhelming the image. Thiebaud called his passion for painting a response to “the sheer attractiveness of making your own world.” “If you glory in the moment when that brush end comes to some little mark or color or line that completes a sequence of relationships, there’s nothing better,” he said. His lifelong exploration of still life, landscape, urban views, and various aspects of the figure is proof of his insistence on pursuing “any kind of painting that I find agreeable or challenging.” Even after more than eight decades of making and thinking about art, the words “challenge” and “impossible” kept recurring. “Painting,” Thiebaud said, “is such a joy and such a challenge. It says yes, it’s impossible. But it’s possible to contend with its impossibility.”

Pie Rows (1961) by Wayne Thiebaud, oil on canvas, 18 x 26 inches. Collection of the Wayne Thiebaud Foundation. Licensed by vaga at Artists Rights Society (ars), NY.

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Five Seated Figures (1965) by Wayne Thiebaud, oil on canvas, 60 x 72 inches. Collection of the Wayne Thiebaud Foundation. Licensed by vaga at Artists Rights Society (ars), NY.

Student (1968) by Wayne Thiebaud, oil on linen, 60 1/8 x 48 1/8 inches. The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art © Wayne Thiebaud / Licensed by VAGA at ARS, New York. Photograph: Katherine Du Tiel. Licensed by vaga at Artists Rights Society (ars), NY.

Private Collection. Licensed by vaga at Artists Rights Society (ars), NY.

Ripley Ridge (1977) by Wayne Thiebaud, oil on canvas, 47 7/8 x 35 7/8 inches.

Brown River (2002) by Wayne Thiebaud, oil on canvas, 72 x 60 inches. Collection of the Wayne Thiebaud Foundation. Licensed by vaga at Artists Rights Society (ars), NY.

Private Collection. Licensed by vaga at Artists Rights Society (ars), NY.

Canyon Pass (2019) by Wayne Thiebaud, oil on canvas, 60 x 60 inches.

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Clown and Beast (Study) (2016) by Wayne Thiebaud, oil on board, 11 1/8 x 14 inches. Private Collection. Licensed by vaga at Artists Rights Society (ars), NY.

A ir conditioning blasted inside the library. Though it was late September, a heat wave had struck. I shivered and shelved books. The liveliest day of the year was here, the Friday of Banned Books Week, and the library was electric. This year, I dreaded going alone to the employee party in the evening. Everyone dressed up and brought their plus ones to Sjonan, a restaurant awash in natural light, with timbered beams and Scandinavian decor and complicated food. Last year, my boyfriend at the time, Steven, went with me, and after each introduction, he would take me aside and whisper things like, “What happened to her face?” or, “Didn’t anyone tell him the dress code?” He chatted up the blonde server with a high ponytail. This was the same Steven, a photographer for the Duluth News Tribune, who would later break up with me because he wanted to date someone more

Nowak

Terri Call Me

Atinteresting.5:25,another librarian, Laura, approached through the aisle of books, lit from within. “Ellen, remember to bring your banned book for the exchange tonight.” She sang the last words like a show tune. I liked Laura. We bonded the day I caught her in the break room plucking an empty Diet Coke can from the garbage and dropping it into the recycle bin with an expression of disgust. She was unusually interested in my love life, which I didn’t think was that interesting. Maybe after being married to an insurance adjuster for 24 years and raising two children, anyone single seemed exotic. Maybe she thought of me the way a zookeeper thinks of the fennec fox, a rare canine with a tiny body and huge ears. It’s hard to look away from something like that. I tugged on my left braid and nodded. I was excited to bring my banned book, The Graveyard by Marek Hłasko, a cautionary tale about the realities of life for the average comrade under Poland’s communist regime. I hadn’t been too interested in my Polish ancestry until a few years ago, when a visiting author commented on my last name. I began to pull fragmented memories from childhood, how my father called me his myszka, little mouse, and told vignettes of hardship from the old country, though he was born in Minnesota and had never been to Poland.

“It might be too soon to ask,” Laura said. She put her hand on my shoulder. “Are you bringing a date?”

Laura’s mouth tensed. I knew she couldn’t agree with me. Steven had charmed her. “At any rate, I’m glad you’re coming,” she said. I wasn’t sure. Going to a social event without a date was the Olympics of single womanhood. Laura gave me a double thumbs-up with a grim smile and buzzed away. The shelving of books relaxed me. Genre, fiction. Author, Austen Jane. Title, Pride and Prejudice. I used my fingers to make a space between Persuasion and Sense and Sensibility and slid the trade paperback into place. * * * After work I meandered home and thought up wild excuses for missing the party. I stopped short when I saw an old payphone kiosk, a concrete post with rusty holes where the phone had been. Across the top was the cornflower blue and white graphic of a phone and circled bell. I could almost see my father reach for the receiver in a flash of aviator sunglasses and lip-dangled cigarette, a pause from so many life imperatives to call his daughter. In his head were promises he wanted to keep. He would be home in time for my birthday. He would take me to Poland to meet distant cousins after my high school graduation. He loved me. The last time I heard from him, his parting words imprinted on my ten-year-old self, “I’ll call again soon, myszka.”

I circled the relic and ran my hand over its coarse surface. Wind blew open my cardigan. A sandbag from a nearby construction project had broken open, and sand was strewn around the base. I stepped back, my footprint stamped in the sand. The scene looked like something from behind the Iron Curtain. It could be art. I was reminded of a piece I saw with Steven when we took a trip to Chicago and visited the Museum of Contemporary Art. One work was composed of rotting orange rinds and copper wire orbited by fruit flies, titled Happy Family. “Is it about the cycle of death and rebirth?” I asked.

I hoped I didn’t look pathetic. “No date.” I smoothed the crop of stray hairs that formed at my crown. “I’ll probably have more fun than last year. Steven was so rude.”

I leaned in to see what the description said, prompting Steven to read it out loud. “An examination of the microcosms within systems, utilizing permanent and perishable elements to evoke domestic life and the finite.”

I tried to estimate how many women Steven had slept with since our breakup. I remembered my new sheets, 1,200-thread count, hotel-white with two embroidered stripes of royal blue across the top, and put the phone face down on the counter. I poured a second glass of wine and made progress on the 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle of the Manhattan skyline that was laid out on the dining room table. Once, when I complained to Laura that there were no good single men in Duluth, that either I liked them and they didn’t like me or vice versa, that I’d be better off in New York, she said, “If you don’t believe they exist here, they won’t exist there either.”

Steven’s breath was warm and not fresh. He wore a black V-neck tee that he thought made him look artistic. “Interesting,” he said. I’d forgotten about that day in Chicago, and how I was still glad to be his girlfriend.

I checked my phone and saw that Steven had left a message. His voice was thick and pleading. Every three or four weeks he would get drunk and want to get back together. I listened to the recording twice.

At 9:32 my phone rang. Steven. “Hello?”

Steven shook his head. “No, Ellen, definitely not.”

The Hopkins Review Volume 15, Issue 02, Spring 2022

I reached into my tote, pushed aside my banned book, and checked the time on my phone. 6:24. I wasn’t going to the party. Evening sunlight cast its glow onto buildings of brick and bluestone and granite, lined up like cereal boxes in a cupboard, backgrounded by the steam plant with its tall smokestack. I liked to pretend the plant didn’t burn coal but was a factory that produced clouds. I climbed the four flights to my apartment, locked the deadbolt behind me, and poured a tumbler of cabernet sauvignon. I was relieved to be home instead of deflecting pity at the party, but I couldn’t help but wonder if I was missing out. From the stool in my kitchen nook, I sipped and stared at the vastness of Lake Superior. With each return to singlehood, I had to be reminded that I was good at spending time with myself.

“Ellen, it’s me,” he said. “I just realized something about myself. I’d like to talk it over. I need you.” There was a long pause and what sounded like his whiskers rubbing against the phone. “Call me. It’s Steven, but you know that.”

I asked. “Can I see you? Let’s go for a walk.” I didn’t reply. “I need you, Ellen. My life’s a mess.” We met at the statue of justice in front of the courthouse, like we used to. Steven stood on the far side of the statue, in profile. The sun was eclipsed by Miller Hill, and the air had cooled. I kicked at a pebble and Steven pivoted to me. His face reminded me of our first meeting, at a party, how I admired his gray eyes, and then his thick biceps and thighs, and how when I learned he was a photographer, I was excited by whatever life such a person might have. Steven opened his arms to invite an embrace, but I stopped.“Ellen, you look great.” A shadow angled across his face. “I almost didn’t recognize you.”

I blinked for a long time. I had lost a few pounds since the breakup. Steven remained the last person to see me naked. Once, he remarked at how squishy my body was and asked if I was really a size six. At the time I took it as a compliment. He was a photographer, after all, and supposedly had a good eye. His desire for me felt like something that could one day make me

I asked. He had more gray hair coming in at the temples. “I’m coming off a pretty bad breakup,” he said. “Yeah,” I said. Steven had his usual haunted expression, as though he was being chased. He wore new jeans, fitted. They looked good on him. We walked and he talked. The breakup wasn’t about me.

“Turns out she was crazy. How was I supposed to know? When we met it was like a thunderbolt. She’s the total package—beautiful, funny, great in bed. I can share this with you, right? We’re friends now?” Before I could answer, he continued. “Here. See for yourself.” He pulled up photos on his phone from Janet Fuller-Lane’s Facebook account. I recognized his home

“Sorry about that voice mail,” he said. “I’ve been going through a hard time.”“Oh?”

“Whatwhole.happened?”

“Why is her name hyphenated?” I asked. “That’s her given name. People do that, Ellen.” I pretended I was witnessing someone else’s conversation. “I met her parents, too. I even loved her “Thatparents.”seems kind of fast,” I said. “Now she won’t stop calling and texting. Would it be wrong to see her again?”Imight have answered, but he kept talking. We passed Wells Fargo; the digital clock glowed 10:08. Dusk had fully surrendered to artificial light. “So, how are you?” he asked. “Great,” I said. “Are you seeing someone?”

The

We stopped for the light at the Lake Avenue intersection. “You are, aren’t you? I can tell,” he said. There was a darkness in his voice that I hadn’t recognized before, but then it softened. “You know I still care.” He reached for my hand. I stepped back. “I have to go.” I willed myself not to apologize.

studio and was hit with a memory of the first time he photographed me there, the way he made me feel seen. I stared at Janet Fuller-Lane’s image. She was bent in an S-curve on the edge of Steven’s velvet chaise lounge, the same lounge I posed on, her chin tilted just so, shiny hair spread out like a fan, her dress so short it looked more like an old-fashioned bathing suit.

“Call me,” he shouted. I walked away, his pleas at my back. Halfway through the crosswalk, I felt his hold on me let loose like so many threads severed by sharp scissors. * * * That night I slipped under the sheets but could not sleep. I flipped from right to left and fixed my eyes on the smokestack outside the window. A bright star, maybe a planet, smoldered above the slender tower. Venus Hopkins Issue 02, Spring 2022

Review Volume 15,

“I’m not sure you get to know those things about me anymore.”

“Who is he? Do I know him?” Steven asked. I headed for the crosswalk. “Take care, Steven.”

rising, I thought, but I didn’t know. Though I’d been single for almost three months, my mind replayed scenes with Steven most nights, but tonight was different. I opened the bedside drawer and looked through the stack of index cards from the library’s old card catalog system. I used the blank backsides for everything—grocery lists, notes, bookmarks. The ones here were for life goals—saving the world, career, creativity, love. I flipped through cards of failed relationships: Ben, Doug, Christopher, James (never call him Jim), Bill, and two Stevens. The first Steven was a German mathematics professor, and I was surprised to discover he was too serious for me. He didn’t laugh at any of my Seinfeld references. The second Steven, the photographer, used to order carryout so we wouldn’t have to get out of bed. I placed a fresh card atop Steven’s, and all the possibilities of the unlined white space moved through me. Shouldn’t my partner be as easy to find as a nonfiction hardcover, the Dewey Decimal number firmly affixed to its spine? A woman in 2016 wasn’t supposed to yearn for a man. I pulled the bedding under my chin and finally slept. I dreamed I was accepting an award on an enormous stage that glowed with light. My lipstick smile was radiant, my hair perfectly smooth. The award was heavier than I expected, and it reflected prisms of light onto the audience, turned their eyes to diamonds. They applauded, cameras flashed, and, from behind one, Steven’s scowling face emerged, and he had the body of a grasshopper. The heat wave broke on Monday, and the air smelled like it had just been made. Laura and I took our break together in the community garden, a compact oasis of fading dahlias and peonies, chrysanthemums and coneflowers, with two benches, encircled by vast amounts of concrete. When Laura asked why I wasn’t at the party, I mumbled that something had come “You’veup.taken a new lover?” she asked. Hot coffee caught in my windpipe. “I wish.”

fiction

* * *

Laura went right into the party gossip. Kirsten, the youngest, newest librarian, brought Mirror of Venus as her banned book.

I opened my mouth to deflect but said, “Thank you.” The evening progressed in bouts of restlessness. I thought about my mother, who loved to say of herself, “Tina waits for no man.” But I remember her always waiting for my father, despondent or enraged or falsely cheerful. In the framed photograph of my mother and father on their wedding day, they looked pious, almost afraid, as if the ornate trappings of the Catholic sanctuary were the first things that alerted them to the gravity of their union. I thought about my father, and how I was supposed to feel angry or bitter but instead I just felt empty. His absence was the only thing about our relationship that felt solid. I stared at the wall map of the United States, at a black dot near the middle that represented the last known place my father lived when my mother finally divorced him.

Once, when I was eight, I asked my father what his job was, and he told me he was a jack-of-all-trades. In my mind I saw the jack of hearts

“What does that mean, exactly? A tizzy?” I asked. I pictured husbands with Nordic food hanging from their mouths, captivated by Kirsten as she paged through the book, holding it up like children’s story time.

I brought a hand to my left braid, but it wasn’t there. That morning I’d flat-ironed my hair and dug under the bathroom sink for a product that promised to “end flyaways all day.”

“I like your hair today,” she said. “Like from a magazine.”

fiction The Hopkins Review Volume 15, Issue 02, Spring 2022

“The Wingate Paine book?” I asked. It was a 1960s picture book of brunetteLaurabombshells.squintedand

* * *

attached clip-on sunglasses to her purple frames. “She’s something, that one. Knew darn well that book wasn’t banned. Got the husbands all in a tizzy.”

Laura looked closely at me. I reached for my absent braid again and rested my hand on my neck instead.

Laura dished the details. I didn’t want to be Kirsten or the topic of workplace gossip, but I did want to be the center of something for someone. “Bold move,” I said.

At shift’s end, I popped a tube of superglue from the supply closet into my tote and hurried to Cooper’s Engraving. Mr. Cooper emerged from the back room. He was tiny and bald with a mustache that was too big for him.

From a bureau of drawers he produced a brass rectangle beveled in black.

“That’s exactly what I was thinking,” I said. “How long will it take?”

I wrote: “With Father in Warsaw, 1999” by Myszka, 2016 Mixed media Concrete, plastic, metal, sand

Soon, the words were engraved in black and perfectly centered. I tucked the plaque into the zipper pouch of my tote as though it were a precious family heirloom. I backtracked on Superior Street to the old payphone, the itch of restlessness replaced by a hum of intention, where I leaned against a sun-warmed granite building and dotted the plaque’s back with superglue. People passed by, but no one seemed to notice when I affixed the plaque to the concrete. I returned to the warmth of the granite and stared at what I

from a playing card, regal and revered. I remember we were in the kitchen sitting at the Formica table eating cereal. My father always ate in a rush, a swirl of motion and food, often swallowing the last bite as he hurried out the door. But the rare times when he stayed home, he would put polka music on the record player and tell stories from the old country with an ease on his face he never showed in regular life. The next morning, my restlessness intensified, like an itch just below the skin’s surface. I walked by the old payphone on my way to work and eyed the blank space between rusty bolt holes. My footprint in the sand was undisturbed and created a sense of ownership. Maybe this was what graffiti artists felt when they tagged a building. Ellen was here.

“Don’t tell anyone, but for you I can have it ready in five minutes,” he said. He slid a paper and pen across the counter. “Just give me the words.”

“Another award for the Library Foundation?” he asked.

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“Hello, Mr. Cooper. No, not today. I’m looking for a small plaque, the kind they use in museums.”

© 2022 Terri Nowak 101 had created. I tried to conjure victory. Instead, my eyes became wet. I blinked and decided to pray, something I rarely did. God, please fix me. The bells of First Presbyterian rang six times. A sign, I thought, but I didn’t know.

I imagined my father reach for the receiver. His eyebrows would raise from behind his sunglasses when he saw the plaque. He would take a drag from his cigarette and try to remember the promises he made. He would wonder how I was doing, where I lived. He would pick up the phone. He would call me.

fiction The Hopkins Review Volume 15, Issue 02, Spring 2022

The divine and stuporous words we tell ourselves climbing out of the boats’ bodies—the rainbowed film on waters beyond our vision.

The air by the docks smells like old batteries and the moon rises through with its judgment, floods the swale above the scene and makes everything sharp-edged. The shadows of forms more knife-like. Each boat’s prow a scythe steadily rocking, moored and clean. The sides rub the docks, suggesting a longing that is mild but constant. Some of us lose our words for such beauty. The cold and the light and the air’s insistence on us catching our breaths having travelled on such boats and their willful enterprise to “wherever she takes me.”

Broth of boiled cloth and acid hands, knuckles raw from wringing suds and swinging denim by fistfuls up and out of the basin. Grime of steam and grease stains blotted out. Rows of hangers on garment conveyors marching shirt after shirt garnished in plastic and the heat from the press to flatten out collars and sleeves. In a different country I might have been royalty.

That glow of my skin in the heat, a hidden seal on an envelope. I live in a republic of hangers. I let the fabrics warm my blistered skin. I let the presses rejoice in silks and the seersucker blazer. Inside the roar of the dryer, I can shout my name, perfect, sequined, and neatly pressed.

Those fishbones on a platter, sucked clean. More skeletal than sheen—blue porcelain plates with fishbones. On a white plate, the dish looks all bone. In times of famine and no fish at all an empty plate can be all colors. Small contingencies of fact are fact. The fat from the eye is/was the sweet meat. The fried fin, eaten also. The mind leaves nothing but numb and rind, or sometimes memories of rind. A remembered whole— empty platters—no rice for the bowl. White plates bought on thrift can clatter when stacked up like decks of cards. Blue plates in the sink soak grease. The fat from frying leaves its ghost trace.

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Sonnet 56,

Diaspora Oliver de la Paz de la Paz Diaspora

Oliver

Sonnet 56

How best to live your current life? Meadows open into other meadows. The past creases itself into smaller and smaller blankets. Outside the hills are yielding mysteries to snow.

And then the time to fill the dashes on the asphalt with the cursive of your name, neat as yellow paint.

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How best to live your current life, you ask? Road maps and gas. Packing just enough to change from one dry shirt to another. To have enough change for a shower and a side-road shelter.

I’ve questioned days where nothing can be put together into interlocking edges. I’ve questioned weeks where I’ve seen my father wander from home to home inside the space of a room.

This boat is quickly filling with ghosts. Long black hair hangs from their mossy heads. They’ve got no eyes I see. They wait in kitchens with empty bowls. They go up the stairs and down again. They are themselves a tide. When I part the curtains they are cut in half, dazzled into shapes cast by the sunlight. Crosses against their chests, they dine and wheeze past all the window seams we’ve sealed with tape. They still whistle. They still ring the doorbell and set the oven timer to announce their cursive contrails. Fog down the halls. Writing on the mirror. A spin of the dial in the car and I know candles burn to end their wicks. Guardrails hold me to the road. This body—their bodies move their shoes in bitten steps. Paths hewn in broken compass roses.

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Father refreshes the browser. The ruler’s face stretched into yawn. His jeweled incisor winks as the camera pans past him toward the crowd. Hands waving as the bodies turn and face the cordoned bleachers. Confetti and lace careening down the promenade like hail in sudden downpours. The vehicles snail past. Diesel belches into the brightened scene and masses of people march in step. Careen down the victorious streets. Loving the view the ruler smiles and nods. He waves to a few young boys. Father dreams he is among his flock, stitched into storylines—weary day’s shock.

James

Cicadas

Daniel Barenboim

Cicadas, James Scales essay Scales

You can play this chord thousands of times and if, on the thousandth and one, the harmony decides to change, and play another chord, you get a new rhythm, which is one thousand times slower.

I t must have been late May or early June of 1996 when we drove down from our house outside of Boston to Ridgewood, New Jersey, where my grandmother lived. The drive, which we made once or twice each year, took more than four hours on the interstate, and at that age it was the longest distance I knew by experience. As we drove, my siblings would point out the familiar sights: a giant flag, the well-known exit signs preceding our arrival in Connecticut, the two-story McDonald’s PlayPlace somewhere past New Haven, or the steel cage of the Tappan Zee. Most notable, however, was the giant sculpture north of Providence called the “Big Blue Bug,” supposed to be the largest artificial insect in the world, 2000 times

Most of my memories of being in New Jersey as a kid are vivid still: the soft click of the screen door latch, the lush beige carpeting, the set of table lamps with studded white glass bowls that curled out at the top like certain fruits or flowers. I spent most of my time in the dim and musty basement with shiplap walls and tiled floors. My mother’s toys were stored down there in boxes, next to an out-of-tune piano and an old brown oil furnace in the corner that always emitted some foreboding buzz. Outside there was a small lawn with a waist-high hedge and a low and twisted apple tree with white lichen on the bark. The tree was cut down some years later when it rotted from the inside, but I remember how it was that spring, 1996, after millions of cicadas had come up from the ground and covered the trunk. At first, I thought their clicking screech, which came in through the windows of the TV room at dusk and kept me up, was the sound of overburdened power lines about to burst, until we saw the piles of their dry, discarded carapaces strewn around the grass.

The house where my mother grew up and where our grandmother still lived with her niece, Aunt Teresa, budded off the stem of a long cul-desac in a sprawling postwar neighborhood, each house built, at least at the beginning, to the same design. My maternal great-grandfather came from Galway, Ireland, and drove a double-decker bus across the Bronx for work; my grandfather served inside a tank during the Battle of the Bulge, and later helped assemble cars at Ford’s plant in Edison, New Jersey. I remember my mother explaining how the roof at her dad’s plant had been covered in grass to hide it from above, but I cannot remember if she said who they were hiding from. A thoughtful man who always made you laugh, my grandfather died from stomach cancer in the early 1970s.

Today, though, as I look through a box of photographs my mother put together before she died from cancer in 2010, I wonder how much of what I remember is a true reflection, and how much has been reshaped or lost. I do not recollect the small red bike with checkered pads, although there is a picture of me riding it. On the back, in my mother’s looping, teacherly script, is written “Ridgewood, 1996.” But I recall the squares of sidewalk I rode over, or I think I can, how they were cracked and lifted by the roots of The Hopkins Review Volume 15, Issue 02, Spring 2022

the size of the eastern subterranean termite which it depicts.

110 © 2022 James Scales Cicadas, James Scales trees. Maybe this is because I suffered (and still do) from astigmatism and nystagmus. It was easier to see with my head pointing down, and as a kid I often walked around watching my feet. It was only last year that a doctor finally explained why I could not see my own eyes shaking in the mirror, since each time they shuttled past whatever point I focused on, he said, they would take in only a single image, like a snapshot, which was later stitched together by my mind into a seamless film. There are no pictures of cicadas in the box, but they must have made a deep impression on me. Under the TV room’s folding couch there was a space I could squeeze into, and I remember closing myself in there, imagining I was underground or in a tomb, and waiting until the last second, just before the claustrophobia set in, to jump out and escape.

The dim line of division between what I remember and forget feels meaningful, but not to anyone but me. What prompted the sudden and involuntary restoration of this vanished world (late spring, New Jersey, 1996) was a mostly trivial encounter, which came about last year. I had been trying to translate the fourth book of Virgil’s Georgics, where he discusses keeping honeybees, and in my research came across a set of articles by Lorenzo Langstroth. Nicknamed the “father of American beekeeping,” Langstroth is most well-known for patenting his eponymous hive design, which is used by beekeepers across the world (including myself), from backyards and rooftops to the largest commercial farms. In the articles, titled “Reminiscences” and published between 1892 and 1893 in the journal Gleanings in Bee Culture, Langstroth gave a detailed account of his early life. He had an early fascination with insects and would crawl around the sidewalk to catch ants and flies in paper cages. “I was considered a foolish boy,” he writes, “whose strange notions ought to be severely discouraged.” One of his teachers took it on herself to break these habits: “I remember very well how she once put me into a dark closet, after tearing up my cage and letting out my flies. I think that, if I were again in that room, I could, even if blindfolded, find the closet and the corner where, as a little child, I cried myself to sleep.” Afterward his experiments grew crueler. Drowning the flies, he would revive them under the sunlight. Later he moved up to mice, repeating the same “water treatment” until they stopped biting and ate tamely from his hand.

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But all of it to no avail. “Struggle as I would,” he wrote, “fight as I could against it, my condition was that of the man lost in the quicksands.” Walking over the deceitful ground, he soon “finds it more and more difficult to lift his feet. . . . Alarmed at last, he vainly tries to escape back to firmer land, only to find that each step sinks him deeper. . . . His head disappears; only the faint motion of a sinking hand is visible, and soon every trace of him disappears forever.” Fearful of loosening the last knots in his mind, Langstroth would resort to constant reading, or sit at the chessboard into the deepest hours of the night, trying to invent and solve the most intricate essay Hopkins

Review Volume 15, Issue 02, Spring 2022

When Langstroth was 17, his father sent him off to preparatory school at the University of Pennsylvania, and then to Yale University, and it was somewhere near this time that he began to suffer from the regular and mysterious attacks which were to cover, as he puts it, nearly half of his adult life with impenetrable darkness. The true cause of these so-called “head troubles” was never revealed. Doctors would ascribe it to blind piles or hemorrhoids, ulcers, lack of exercise, poor diet, or congestion of the spine, and treatment ranged from walking tours to deep massages or shocks with electric needles passed into him from his doctor’s body.

But it was his observations of the 17-year “locust” (cicada, in fact— locust was an early misnomer) that caught my attention. Langstroth first saw them when he was eight years old, in Center Square in Philadelphia. The nymphs come up from the ground in early evening, he wrote, from holes “as smoothly bored as though made with an auger,” and quickly make for nearby trees or shrubs, where they set their sharp claws in the chosen surface. When they first come out, their body is quite hard, but soon they grew helpless, becoming “almost as soft as dough.” If prevented from getting a firm hold on some object, they could not escape their nymphal case, wrote Langstroth, and if approached too suddenly, they would drop to the ground, quite “possumlike,” and play as if dead. But, if attached somewhere, their body starts contracting and expanding, “until what at first seems like a small crack in its back widens and widens, continually disclosing more and more [and] at last it raises its head and the large part of its body from the shell,” looking considerably, he writes, “like an Egyptian mummy standing upright in its case, with its upper wrappings taken off.”

The

Reading through Langstroth’s accounts, I found myself returning to a chance remark once made by Dr. M——, one of the doctors at my father’s hospice, who explained the mind’s propensity, when under stress, to dredge up not only its most painful memories but also the long and tangled bundle of associations that were wrapped around them. My father’s mind was more and more disheveled in the last months of his life. He was unable to distinguish one of his children from the next and did not know the date or where he was. And his lexicon fell back, quite eerily, on terms that felt almost a century out of use (washtub, basin, icebox, for example) as if bobbing up from somewhere deep inside his childhood.

112 © 2022 James Scales Cicadas, James Scales problems, as if playing for his very sanity. He lost all interest in the bees and preferred to sit, when ill, where he could neither see nor hear them. “Even the sight of a big letter B,” he wrote, “would painfully affect me.”

One of my sisters explained the accident he suffered in his teens to Dr. M——, during which a close friend had been killed and our father left for some unknown duration in a coma. The one who died had switched seats with my father just before the crash. After emerging, having missed the funeral, into what must have been a profound sense of guilt, my father fell into a deep depression. He was eventually hospitalized and later treated with electroshocks. His consequent fear of doctors played a role, perhaps, in his ignoring the large growth that spread across his back in the years after my mother died. Dr. M——, nodding as if checking off a list, went on to explain how the very mechanisms which allowed the mind to flee a present circumstance could bring it back, circuitously, to any of the countless former stresses that had once prompted its flight, so that, in trying to escape, one came back to the beginning, as though stuck in a revolving house of mirrors. This short-circuiting often occurred in the middle of a mundane conversation, with my father talking to some unseen person from his past, or mixing up a picture of a sister’s recent baby with another of his daughters, born decades earlier. He shared opinions wholly out of character: the football game on TV bored him, and he found the documentaries on World War II, in front of which he had so often sat with a dish of mint chocolate chip ice cream, no longer tolerable, saying only that it made no sense to him and seemed like a waste of time. The strange lightness he inhabited essay

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Prompted by fortuity, I read more, and later found the work of noted entomologist Gene Kritsky, whose book, incidentally, on beekeeping in Ancient Egypt I had already eyed for my translation of the Georgics. In the fourth book, Virgil claims that the Egyptians could produce new stocks of bees by burying a slaughtered ox, in a complex and mystic ritual known as bugonia. Aristaeus, in this version of the story, had lost his bees to hunger and disease after chasing Eurydice and causing her to die. He consults the nymph Cyrene, his mother, only to be told that he must track down and capture Proteus, the shapeshifting sea-god. He does so, and the secret recipe is given: in spring, just as the winds are rising, he must beat to death a twoyear calf and leave it in a narrow, confined shack, with boughs of thyme and cassia beneath the flanks, and soon, “like sudden showers from a summer cloud,” the restored bees will fly out from the corpse.

in those moments came as an intense surprise, given his sometimes severe reticence throughout my childhood, and I could not help but think of all the thoughts and memories that were locked inside him and would soon be lost. One night, after the nurse had laid him into bed, he managed to cross the room without triggering the bed’s alarm and open the small freezer where one of us had left a bag of Peppermint Patties. The nurse found him lying on the covers with a boyish grin, the foil wrappers laid across his chest.

Whatever drew me into Langstroth’s biography, it was the odd coincidences that kept me returning, and that eventually produced a sense in me that our lives were strangely intertwined. My father was 17 when his accident occurred, the same age as Langstroth when his attacks began. Langstroth and I were the same age, eight, when we first saw the cicadas. And by my calculation, we had seen the same brood, the so-called Brood X, which was the same brood that was forecast to return in 2021. Awaiting their arrival last May, I was saddened to hear nothing in the backyard but the sounds of traffic and the wail of ambulances. Sometime in June I misheard a woman in the park who asked me for a pair of secateurs. And after a long and stressful week in early September, I found on the doorstep a green and black flat-headed specimen of Neotibicen canicularis, the socalled dog-day cicada, an annual cousin of the 17-year Magicicada cassinii, which comes out each August.

Reading Kritsky’s work on periodical cicadas (Periodical Cicadas: The Brood X Edition, Ohio Biological Survey, 2021), I learn that the first written record of Brood X came in May of 1715, when the Reverend Andreas Sandel of Philadelphia described in his journal “some singular flies [which] came out of the ground; the English call them locusts.” By 1817, the year Langstroth first saw them, their regularity had been largely acknowledged, as too had their brevity. “Transient as their life has been, the locusts have left some remembrance of their being,” reports the Carlisle Gazette on June 17th of that year. Most emblematic of their presence was the screeching buzz they made, which Gideon B. Smith described as “wonderful . . . not deafening.” On June 25th, 1851, he heard the last note of their song that year, and “the melancholy reflection occurred—shall I live to hear it again?” Smith would die in 1867, missing the next emergence by a year. In 1851, Langstroth returned to Philadelphia, this time bringing his daughter to the park to watch for cicadas. They sat up until after midnight to observe the insects change, and although it had been more than 30 years, Langstroth could have described them almost as as vividly from memory alone as after seeing them that night. Once they have removed their body from the nymphal skin, the now-adult cicada rests a while, and its wings unfold into position for its first flight. From here they live only a few more weeks. The female lays her eggs into the bark of small twigs, and after a few months the nymphs are released. They drop onto the ground and burrow down into the dark, where they dig and suckle on the roots of nearby plants. They can tell the passage of a year, it seems, from the changing content of the sap they nourish on, but how it is they count to 17 remains a mystery. 1851 was also the year that Langstroth achieved the insight that would make him famous. The bees he had been keeping would not stop sealing the boxes shut with wax or propolis, thus making his work more tedious, as he had to pry and scrape each frame out of the box before inspecting them. Smaller gaps were sealed with propolis, and larger openings with wax, but in between, he suddenly surmised, there must have been a span the bees would leave unfilled, to make space for access and fresh air inside the hive. His new design, tested in the spring of 1852, would integrate this span, called “bee space,” throughout the hive. Now each frame can be pulled out as easily essay

as files from a cabinet, and the bees themselves tamed to a remarkable degree, and made harmless as flies. That summer he built more than a hundred hives, some from empty champagne crates, and went so far as to patent his invention, but by autumn the head trouble came again, and he sold his boxes, bees and all, to whomever would have them.

The cause of these attacks, as said, was not discovered in Langstroth’s lifetime, although I searched for clues. There seemed to be a smoldering anxiety in Langstroth, the eldest son, about his father, who owned two paper mills in Pennsylvania and seems to have been sorely disappointed in his son’s career as minister, at the start of which he withdrew all financial backing. When his father died in 1837 Langstroth was left caring for his mother and a sister on a meager preacher’s salary. And sometimes I think his grief was, perhaps, for the bees themselves, with whom he seemed to empathize uncannily, and who were tightly expelled from view during his melancholic episodes. When he was an infant, someone had thrown a sulfur-soaked rag into the fire, almost choking him to death. Later, he would brag about how, thanks to the use of his new hive, it was no longer common to take honey by drowning the bees or setting the colony on top of burning sulfur coals to suffocate them. He could never have imagined the enormous transformations that took place in agriculture after his death, nor the pressure put on honeybees in supporting industrial-scale crop production, a state which nearly threatens their extinction.

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In contemporary terms, Langstroth’s symptoms match most neatly with bipolar disorder—periods of insomnia and depression, interchanged with hypomania, excessive talk, and racing thoughts. Writing about the change, he described “an electrical thrill [that] seems to pass through my hands, extending itself to the very tips of my fingers, just as though something like quicksilver were forcing itself through them for an exit.” He would die a few years after finishing his Reminiscences, during a sermon he was giving in Dayton, Ohio. “It is of the love of God that I wish to speak to you this morning,” he told the crowd of worshippers, “what it has been, what it is, what it means to us, and what we ought——.” As he finished the last word, according to a letter from his daughter, he hesitated: “his form stiffened out convulsively; his head fell back, and within three minutes he was absent from the body.” Hopkins

Review Volume 15, Issue 02, Spring 2022

Trying to make sense of all of this, of my interest in the life of some obscure inventor, I suddenly discovered that I must have lost the count; it was not Brood X that I saw in 1996, could not have been, but instead must have been Brood II, which extends from Massachusetts to North Carolina and is next expected in 2030. I had thought there must have been a secret explanation somewhere in the chance encounters, a pattern that would slowly be exposed. But now I worried that it would all come apart or collapse if looked at too closely, and I had better shut my eyes or turn my head. From the box of photographs, I pull out a picture of my mother in New Jersey, her face obscured by a balloon. Her handwriting on the back says “1996.” Were we celebrating my birthday? What can they tell us anymore, these pictures of the dead?

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My mother died in late April, and, just like my father, spent her last days in conversation with some unseen phantoms from her past. It was the same with my grandmother too, who passed away a year after my mother. The hallways of my grandmother’s hospice, I recall, were crammed with beeping machinery and echoed with the voices of the residents, nurses, and, it always seemed, several dozen TV sets going at once, overflowing from each room with football games or political debates, all of which added to the building’s atmosphere of general panic and diffused anxiety. From her bed my grandmother would patiently insist on sitting up, against the gentle chiding of our hands, and gesture at the lights above her head. Later in the hallway the nurse loudly explained that what had agitated her was the sight of faces from her past, gazing down at her with love, as though from a great height, but I knew otherwise. The look that crossed her face was recognition, yes, but of something dormant and too suddenly exhumed.

Although I made a few white friends the first few weeks of school, I couldn’t help but notice how segregated the city was as opposed to my old New York neighborhood. There was a huge Confederate flag hung in a Dundalk comic book shop I visited and, later, I was warned from venturing into the white enclave of Hampden. Coming from a community that was a melting pot of cultures, races, and religions, I had grown up in a family that befriended, and sometimes married, other races; I rarely thought about race and racism until I moved to Baltimore.

* *

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hen I was a young boy living in Harlem during the early 1970s, I thought of Los Angeles as the Promised Land. It was where Disneyland was located, television and movies were filmed and, I imagined, palm trees grew on every block. L.A. wasn’t a city, but a fantasy—a pleasant dream where the Beach Boys provided the soundtrack and the sun always shined. Staring at the smiling faces of game show contestants on the TV screen, I was convinced that everything in the West was perfect.

It was the era of Jimmy Carter in the White House, Three’s Company on television, and disco music taking over America’s airwaves. At my new high school, Northwestern, I became fast friends with Larry Ressin, a jock who played lacrosse and drew as well as anyone at Marvel Comics except Jack Kirby. We met in first period journalism. He and I bonded over rock music, comic books, and movies. After a while I was spending more time at his house than my own. His mother and father were cool, and he had a twin brother named Terry who was in a couple of my classes.

“If we ever move, can we go to Los Angeles?” I asked my mom when I was about six. “Of course,” she said. I realized her answer was just another parental lie nine years later when mom announced, in the winter of 1978, that we’d soon be moving to Baltimore. We’d visited my Aunt Charlotte and cousin Marie there for years, so I somewhat knew that the spooky industrial southern metropolis by the sea, best known for steamed crabs, the Colts football team, and being the place where Edgar Allan Poe died, was the complete opposite of Los Angeles and the dream city I imagined living in. *

Dreamin’ California, Michael A. Gonzales 117 Michael A. Gonzales Dreamin’ California

Dreamin’ California, Michael A. Gonzales

One afternoon, Larry and I were hanging out in the third-floor hallway waiting for our biology teacher, Miss Solomon, when I noticed a tall, stunning blonde wearing blue jeans and a gray Jackson Browne T-shirt. Though it was cold outside, Northwestern was always overheated. Most kids left their coats and sweaters in their lockers. Her Browne tee indicated that she was, like me, a music fan. Unlike some kids today who wear vintage band shirts without knowledge of group, back then who you wore on your T-shirt reflected personal taste.

In the 2018 documentary Echo in the Canyon, everyone interviewed (The Mamas & the Papas vocalist Michelle Phillips, Jackson Browne, and the film’s guide, Jakob Dylan) tells us how much like family they all were: they jammed and wrote songs together, puffed weed and had dinner as a collective. They were all managed by Brooklyn native David Geffen, recorded for his label, Asylum Records, and played on each other’s records. Much like Gertrude Stein’s infamous art salons in 1920s Paris or the Beat boys causing a literary ruckus in 1950s New York, the singer/songwriters of 1970s Laurel Canyon were a creative collective with a romantic backstory. Within a few years they’d all be very rich and move in separate directions, but those early years were unique, and that specialness could be heard in the music.

“Who the hell is that?” I asked Larry as we both glanced at the girl leaning against the wall. Larry smirked. “I don’t have the slightest idea, but she’s hot.” Indeed, it was the also the era of Hollywood starlets like Loni Anderson, Suzanne Somers, and Farrah Fawcett—“hot blondes.” The stranger looked as though she’d come straight from central casting. I moved closer to Larry and whispered, “Watch this.” I started speaking louder so the mystery blonde could hear me. “If the teacher doesn’t hurry up, I’m going to cut class and go home and play my Jackson Browne album.” The blonde turned around, looked at me and smiled. “Are you a Jackson Browne fan?” she asked. Truthfully, I knew that Browne was down with the Los Angeles/Laurel Canyon music scene that included Joni Mitchell, The Eagles, Linda Ronstadt, Neil Young, James Taylor, and others who rocked in a folksy/country acoustic guitar way.

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Though a self-described “Princess,” a word she used kiddingly, she was more grounded than most and nicer than others. While Ruth was born and raised in Baltimore, she sure looked like one of those girls who might’ve been at a rocker’s California house party breaking hearts and inspiring songs simply by walking across the room.

Later that week, we spoke on the phone, and I told her about all-boys Rice High, the Catholic school I attended before moving to Baltimore, while she told me about transferring from Western High, an all-girls public school in Baltimore that smart young ladies from throughout the city attended.“Ijust couldn’t take it anymore,” she said. “Every day, it was just so stressful. I always felt as though I was competing. It was too much.” Ruth, for all her princessness, was a sweet, soft-spoken young woman who was a bit shy, and, like me, cautious of our new surroundings. Our short talks soon became long conversations. Ruth was easy to talk to and had a wicked sense of humor.While it was unexpected on my end, we soon became as close as me and OneLarry.afternoon when I was at the mall alone, I finally broke down and bought Jackson Browne’s album The Pretender. In the store, I was drawn initially by the striking cover that showed a solitary Browne walking down a street where most of the pedestrians were Black and Brown essay

The Hopkins Review Volume 15, Issue 02, Spring 2022

I knew a few of Jackson Browne’s singles—“Doctor My Eyes,” “The Pretender,” and the (then) recently released “Running on Empty”—but at first, I thought he was a tad boring. Browne’s music sounded as though he’d smoked a Cheech & Chong mega-doobie before recording. Most teenage boys need a little more aggression mixed with their melancholy. I couldn’t imagine him hanging out with my man Jim Morrison or guitar battling with Hendrix. Still, I pretended.

“He’s cool, but I do prefer Led Zep, Billy Joel, and Bruce Springsteen more.”“Ilike Springsteen too. ‘Born to Run,’ ‘Darkness on the Edge of Town.’ I have those.” Extending my hand, I smiled. “I’m Michael.” She grinned as she took my hand. “I’m Ruth. . . . Ruth Strauss.”

After returning home, I went into the living room where the stereo was and flopped down on the couch. Excited, I ripped open the packaging, placed the vinyl on the turntable, and eagerly put the needle to the record.

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“Caught between the longing for love / And the struggle for the legal tender,” Browne wrote. “Where the sirens sing and the church bells ring / And the junk man pounds his fender. . . . Out into the cool of the evening / Strolls the pretender / He knows that all his hopes and dreams / Begin and end there.” Browne’s poetic realism had a sense of melancholy that I liked. I no longer thought of him as the boring high guy. * As winter slowly slipped into spring, Ruth and I sometimes took long walks through the quiet neighborhood after school. The northwest section of the city was a community of private homes complete with small lawns neatly mowed, kids playing in the backyard, and practical cars parked out front. Unlike other girls I knew, Ruth didn’t have a steady boyfriend, so our conversations were rarely about boys unless she brought up Robby Benson, a young pretty-boy actor who had done a few television appearances and movies. Though I’d never seen Ruth’s bedroom, I imagined there were posters of baby-faced Benson beaming from the walls like L.A. sunshine.

Ruth lived close to Northwestern and soon invited me to her home for

Dreamin’ California, Michael A. Gonzales working-class folks. This was the other Los Angeles, the part of the city not depicted in most ’70s pop culture except Sanford and Son or Chico and the Man. While Browne stood out in his pristine white T-shirt, he was an Everyman by association.

I was happy to see that the lyrics were printed on the album’s sleeve. During that era many songwriters were also storytellers, often crafting their songs like poetic short stories; Browne expressed his loneliness and pain in standouts “The Fuse,” “Here Come Those Tears Again,” and the title track.

* *

I was always struck by the lyrics of “The Pretender,” where he wrote about a working-class guy trying to navigate though a dead-end job, a troubled romance, and the constant barrage of advertising messages encouraging him to change his life.

dinner to meet her parents and older sister Debbie. It was a stunning house with a spacious living room and dining room. Her parents were German immigrants; her father Alfred had survived a concentration camp. I told Mr. Strauss about Uncle Hans, my German godfather from Breslau who escaped the Holocaust. Then I listened as he talked about the pain and misery he Neitherendured.Ruthnor her sister seemed interested in their dad’s tales, but I assumed they’d heard them many times. “Ruth tells me you want to be a writer,” Mr. Strauss said. “What sort of stories do you write?”

“Comic book scripts?”

I was surprised that I knew those songs better than I thought. Having grown up listening to nyc pop music station wabc, Young’s singles were essay Hopkins

Mr. Strauss had a pleased expression. “That’s very ambitious. Before you leave, I’ll give you a book written by my favorite writer, Hermann Hesse.” Later that night, before driving me home, he gifted me with a copy of Steppenwolf. As though on cue, Ruth came over to where we were seated on the couch and stood over us.

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“I recently wrote an essay about Led Zeppelin for the school paper.” He looked puzzled. “They’re a heavy metal group, one of my favorites. I’ve also been trying to write a lot of science fiction and fantasy, just short stories and comic book scripts, but I can’t seem to ever finish anything.”

“Like screenplays, but for comics. Before I left New York I was trying to sell scripts to DC Comics’ horror line. I used to visit with the editor, but I didn’t have any luck.”

“Don’t try to steal my friend, Daddy,” she said playfully. “Come outside, Michael. A few of my friends came over.”

The backyard was lush with trees and flowers. The few girls wore sweaters and the boys had on casual jackets. With the full moon high, everyone was enraptured by some long-haired teenager acoustic guitarstrumming the songs of Neil Young. I’d obviously missed some of his set, but when I got to the area, he was playing “After the Gold Rush” and continued to jam through various songs in Young’s catalog including “Down by the River,” “Harvest Moon,” and “Heart of Gold.” The entire backyard was a corny hippie scene, but I enjoyed myself.

Review Volume 15, Issue 02, Spring 2022

Larry and Ruth became my two constant companions, with me spending most of my time with one or the other, and sometimes together. As a trio we’d go to Reisterstown Mall, hanging out at the record shop or Waldenbooks and always stopping so I could get a frozen yogurt at tcby and some Mrs. Fields cookies. On other days we might drive to the record shop in Pikesville that specialized in punk and post-punk music. In their windows were huge posters for Stiff Records, Elvis Costello (This Year’s Model, Armed Forces), Nick Lowe and the Pretenders. Occasionally Larry’s twin brother Terry joined us. Their red hair was where the twin biz ended, with Terry being the more handsome of the two. If they were Kennedys, Terry would be Jack, and Larry was Ted. Sometimes Larry’s girlfriend Patty, who was our school’s reigning tennis champ, came along too. Patty was mad cool and had tried to teach me to play at our campus courts. After my third lesson, I could tell she was getting frustrated with my ineptitude. “This game’s not for everyone, Mike,” she said sweetly. Afterward we walked together to Larry’s house. They were sweeties for a long time, but broke up sometime during senior year. I had no idea why, but years later I came to understand it was because Patty’s father, who had essay

Like Jackson Browne, the Canadian born Neil Young was connected to the Laurel Canyon sound, and a little bit of a “pretender” himself. I assumed that Young was from the South, and was surprised years later when I discovered that he, like Joni Mitchell, was from Canada.

At the end of the night, when Mr. Strauss drove me home, I was still humming those songs. “Southern Man” was especially stuck in my brain. I’d never paid much attention to the lyrics when I heard it on the radio, but “Southern Man” talked about slavery, the kkk, the Bible, and the “shame” of interracial romance. “Lily Belle, your hair is golden brown / I’ve seen your black man comin’ round / Swear by God I’m gonna cut him down.” * *

Dreamin’ California, Michael A. Gonzales a part of their playlist. I stared at the young dude playing guitar, watched his fingers on the frets. He made it look so easy. I had taken guitar lessons a few years back, but the only thing I got from those classes were blisters.

“I like you too, Michael, but we can’t date.”

raised her Catholic, began having issues with Larry being Jewish.

“I thought your parents loved me.”

Hell, I had already convinced myself that I wasn’t going to lose my virginity until I moved back to New York City, so sex wasn’t in the equation. I suppose I just wanted a girlfriend because it seemed to me every other teenage boy had one. To be rejected simply on the basis of race was something different for me. Years later my good friend and fellow writer Robert Morales said when I told him the story, “You forgot you were a big Black man.” We both laughed as I nodded my head in agreement. “Not just a big Black man, but a big Black man in the South.”

Certainly, though some Baltimore people will try to argue that their city isn’t the South, it most definitely is and, back then, the division was severe. I never saw interracial couples anywhere. In the eyes of some, Ruth would’ve been Neil Young’s Lily Belle, and I would’ve been the “black man comin’ round.” A side of me wondered if Ruth’s parents had questioned her about me, or if she just figured I would eventually ask and had already thought out her reply. That rejection made me stronger, as well as more aware that casual essay

“They ‘love you’ as my friend; as my boyfriend would be another story.” There was nothing I could do except let it go; though I never brought the subject up again, it weighed heavy on me for a few weeks. Granted, having never had a girlfriend, I had no idea what being a “boyfriend” meant. Besides kissing, how would our relationship have been different? We already hung out and talked on the phone for hours, so what exactly was I looking for?

I, on the other hand, was virgin without a girlfriend. While I had a few female friends, I was shy when it came to romance. I had never even dated. Though Ruth and I were besties, I developed a crush on her. I didn’t try to kiss her or anything goofy, I just blurted it out one night over the phone. Like a giant icicle, time froze.

“Why not?”

“My parents would lose their minds if I dated a Black guy,” Ruth said simply. It was something I hadn’t even thought about; I didn’t look at Ruth as my “white” friend, but at that moment the heavy truth came crashing down.

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For years afterward, whenever I heard Linda Ronstadt, James Taylor, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne, or Carole King’s brilliant “So Far Away” or “You’ve Got a Friend” played in various elevators and supermarkets, I thought of my old friend. Now, 40 years after I last saw Ruth Strauss, those songs endure as the poetic anthems of a California that no longer exists, and perhaps never did.

The last time I saw Ruth, she visited New York in the winter of 1982 when she and her family came to see The Pirates of Penzance on Broadway; one of the stars was Ruth’s heartthrob Robby Benson. I met the Strausses at the Plaza Hotel where we had dinner before taxiing to the Minskoff Theatre on 45th Street. Afterward, I stood at the stage door with Ruth and other Benson fans until he came outside and signed our Playbills. After she returned to Baltimore, Ruth and I spoke a few more times, but the friendship that was once so strong soon faded. I suppose both of us were to blame. Nine years later, when I finally made it to Los Angeles, where I stayed for two weeks with my college pal Paul, I went to Disneyland, visited Universal Studios and had him cruise along the winding roads of Laurel Canyon. I thought about Ruth and wondered what became of my former friend: was she married with children living somewhere in the world with a loving husband, or walking a solitary path dressed like a hippie in a flowing white dress that stopped at the top of her feet as her long blonde hair blew in the breeze and a pothead guitarist strummed Jackson Browne and Neil Young songs in the distance?

racism can be screamed by a stranger or whispered by a friend. One night when the whole group of us was hanging out at Dominic’s Pizzeria up the block from school, I noticed Ruth and Terry flirting. For a few minutes I felt betrayed, but I remained silent. Though they never dated, Terry did take her to our senior prom.

That April, Ruth decided that she was through with school. She got her parents’ permission to drop out of Northwestern and get her ged. Still, she and I talked damn near every day. Months later, when she got her driver’s license on her birthday in August, she picked me up in her new car and, with the pedal to the metal, zoomed downtown to Tio Pepe for lunch. A month later though, I was back in the New York groove.

In Geoffrey Wright’s 2006 Australian rendition set in modern-day Melbourne, a trio of sneering teenage girls chisel out the eyes of Christian cemetery headstones, their prep school uniforms matching in the fog. In Rupert Goold’s 2010 television version for the bbc, the witches appear as hospital nurses attending a wounded soldier in midcentury Eastern Europe; after stopping his heart and tearing it from his chest, they pull down their surgical masks to exchange the 13 lines that comprise the first scene.

Joel Coen’s Visionary The Tragedy of Macbeth W hen shall we three meet again,” asks the first of the women, “In thunder, lightning, or in rain?” “When the hurlyburly’s done, / When the battle’s lost and won,” responds the second. The eerie, iconic launch to Shakespeare’s 1606 tragedy may also be one of the most screenready: at least 38 film adaptations have been produced, the first a 1908 silent short by British American director J. Stuart Blackton.

Banquo (Bertie Carvel) crosses the battlefield. The “witches” appear at last in human form a few minutes later, channeled via the tiny, tremendous, and often terrifying body of Kathryn Hunter, a 64-year-old English actor best known for her London stage

Eileen G’Sell Fair Is Foul and Foul Is Fair:

G’Sellfilm review

In keeping with its stark, hyper-stylized vision, the first shot of the most recent installment of Shakespeare’s infamous “Scottish Play”—Joel Coen’s 2021 The Tragedy of Macbeth—features nothing but four letters against a black background: “when.” Presented in all-caps serif font, this opening preposition comes across as a looming proposition. After the first witch’s query is whispered by an unseen speaker, the second witch’s response follows in guttural, androgynous tones. “Fair is foul and foul is fair: / Hover through the fog and filthy air,” the voice concludes haltingly, the shot cutting to an all-white screen to the sound of a revolving slide projector. This blank box, in Academy ratio, becomes a clouded sky in which three prophetic ravens circle. The wind softly howls as footsteps appear below in the snow-like sand (the original stage direction for scene 1 is “in the desert”).

125 Fair Is Foul and Foul Is Fair: Joel Coen’s Visionary The Tragedy of Macbeth, Eileen

Across the eras, the ways by which the three witches are corporeally conjured and creatively contextualized often set the tenor of what is to follow.

In Roman Polanski’s gritty 1971 version, a pair of hunched, phlegmatic crones intone the opening couplets on an abandoned beach, burying a human hand in the sand, while a third witch, around 30 years old, mutely participates.

Much has been made about Denzel Washington’s and Frances McDormand’s masterful portrayals of the play’s eponymous villains, along with the impressive ensemble of veteran and emerging actors who fuel its diegesis. No matter the hype, however warranted, about the A-list actors in this film, the visual and lyrical artfulness of Coen’s version of Macbeth—as embodied early on by Hunter’s spare, kinesthetically unsettling performance— is what makes it worth seeing, and what made it worth making another Macbeth to begin with. The 105-minute, black-and-white drama puts a contemporary, minimalist spin on German expressionism, adding a dash of Orson Wellesian noir. “I wanted to go as far as I could away from realism and more towards a theatrical presentation,” Coen told The New York Times. “I was trying to strip things away and reduce things to a theatrical essence, but still have it be cinema.” In set design and mise-en-scène, light and dark take on a geometric, meditative quality, as though the sharp consequences of greed and ambition are cast across the halls and corridors, regret echoing down the castle stairs. Acute triangles of daylight fall across the walls. The spires of Fair Is Foul and Foul Is Fair: Joel Coen’s Visionary The Tragedy of Macbeth, Eileen G’Sell

career. “Where hast thou been, sister?” she asks, her wiry frame fetal in the sand. “Killing swine,” she responds to her own question, lowering her voice, a clue that she is playing all three “sisters.” Her twisted torso lifts to face the camera; her long, seemingly double-jointed arms tuck beneath her left haunch, nicked shin bending over her elbow. Merging necromancy with gruesome acrobatics, Hunter’s “Witches” reminds one of both a demonic sprite and Murnau’s Nosferatu—limber and spindly in her black skull cap. She crawls through the sand, a sailor’s thumb between her toes, and delivers the witches’ lines in a different sequence from Shakespeare’s original, lending a scrambled, hallucinatory aspect to their three-part exchange. “The weird sisters, hand in hand,” she chants, flapping her own like wings.

When Macbeth (Denzel Washington) and Banquo come across her lone figure, they are as mystified as we are. “Speak, if you can: what are you?” asks the doomed general. Two identical reflections appear in a pool of water in front of Witches’ cloaked form, inversions of her dark, triangular silhouette. Three voices declare at once, “All hail, Macbeth, hail to thee, Thane of Cawdor!” Then the triplet figures lift their elbows and, as birds, screech into the sky, their curse mistaken for triumph.

“Into the air; and what seem’d corporal melted / As breath into the wind,” says Macbeth when the witches first flutter off. More apparitional than cinematic, this latest Coen venture truly ensorcels.

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Lady Macbeth’s tiara look like art deco towers. Of Coen’s choice to cull color from the film, The New Yorker’s Richard Brody flippantly claims that “[t]he movie is filmed in black-and-white because, you know, colors hadn’t been invented yet in Shakespeare’s time,” misconstruing the conspicuous lack of color for lazy historicizing, as though either Coen brother ever erred on the side of ignorance (or indolence) in their aesthetic decisions. Rather, black and white seem to represent the desolate moral topography of the play itself—how easy it is to step into a lambent path and stumble into shadow, how quickly ambition can poison the mind. Whether it’s the ravens looping the sky (hello Poe) or the metronomic beat to which both blood and water drip, the poetic visuals and cadence of the film are palpable, if sometimes jarring. Scale shifts from extreme long shot to extreme close up; rarely do characters confront each other—or us— in conventional medium close-ups or three-quarter shots. The compressed aspect ratio traps the characters within their lofty royal confines. On the big screen—and this is a film that should be seen, and heard, on a big screen if possible—the style of the film overrides both the dialogue and diegesis. And this is something to celebrate.

When You Learn the Alphabet, by Kendra Allen (University of Iowa Press, 2019), 160 pp.

We’re never quite on settled ground in When You Learn the Alphabet.

K endra Allen’s literary debut, the essay collection When You Learn the Alphabet, is a relatively short but densely packed portrait of a Black life, a raw rendering of familial relationships inflected by race, gender, trauma, and disability. The book explores grown folks’ business in great detail, business that Allen is caught precariously in the middle of as a child. Allen’s parents’ relationship, her childhood in Dallas, Texas, and the fallout of their coming together, burning out, and pulling apart are the central events that the book orbits. The second essay in the collection, titled “About American Marriages,” details her parents’ seven-year separation and eventual divorce: “This is what happened: What I’ve been told: Which is what always happens: Your husband begins having sex with a woman, who isn’t you and he doesn’t even care enough to hide it well.” The essay goes on to describe the separation that allows her mother to keep hope alive and allows her father to come and go as he pleases, often without seeing Allen. Allen painfully draws out the rising tension as her father builds a life with the other woman and her child in Houston, unbeknownst to her mother, and mandates that she participate in the cover-up. It leads to this heartbreaking culmination: “When my mama finally files for divorce, it feels like she not only divorces my daddy, but every once in a while, when the subject is brought up, it feels like she’s divorced me too.”

Kendra Allen’s Learning & Unlearning, Jalen Eutsey book review

Jalen Eutsey Kendra Allen’s Learning & Unlearning

As the book develops, we learn more and more about this triumvirate. We see moments of physical violence and manifestations of post-traumatic stress disorder—both of Allen’s parents have been diagnosed as disabled veterans, although her father’s diagnosis is “100% disabled veteran” while her mother’s is “90% disabled veteran.” It’s clear that even this diagnosis is not free of the influence of race and gender: “She’s been shooting for 100% for a couple of years now, but even after working at the VA for 28 years, and even after all her apparent symptoms of forcefulness, forgetfulness, and injury, they just won’t let her have it. Her wounds ain’t physical enough. She ain’t pale enough. She ain’t male enough.”

Allen makes all the beautiful and painful contradictions of humanity, of the individual, plain in her essays. One of my favorite examples comes in the titular essay, “When You Learn the Alphabet,” which is presented as an abecedarian, with each new vignette beginning with a subsequent letter of the alphabet. H begins this way: “Horror story: Your childhood friend goes to jail for not snitching.” The section continues by detailing the conditioning, from childhood, that puts the highest priority on not snitching. Yet, the most compelling part of the section is how Allen feels about this life- altering decision: “He was just doing what he was told. But part of you blames him he’s still in a small cell years later for a crime he didn’t commit. Part of you blames him for committing to be loyal only.” But even as Allen makes this point, there is this honest admission: “Part of you that follows the impossible expectations of the hood praises him for being some obscured version of a real nigga.”

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Allen slips in and out of genres in this collection, from the abecedarian essay to a short section, “Boy Is a White Racist Word,” organized as a contrapuntal poem. All the while, she mixes personal narrative with cultural critique, placing her work invariably in conversation with the work of writers like Hanif Abdurraqib and Kiese Laymon. Allen often references pop culture, most notably music and film. True Blood, Moonlight, Monster’s Ball, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Behind the Music, Jay-Z, Boyz n the Hood, and Everybody Hates Chris (among others), all get a mention. This familiarity with popular media allows her to draw out some profound critiques. In one such example, the essay “The Bitch Had Discipline,” Allen turns over the nonviolent lessons of one Amy Elliott Dunne from Gillian Flynn’s novel Gone Girl. It is a bracing illumination of the many ways women are forced to condense themselves for men’s comfort or pleasure: I’m intrigued by the way she stopped caring about men’s feelings. She couldn’t care less about what you would feel as long as she was felt. She didn’t let being seen in a particular way stop her from being who she wanted to be. She wasn’t afraid to be too much of something. She was overabundant. Excessive. Overwhelming. Full. Greedy. . . . She was just another woman—on a neverending list of women—who felt stupid for allowing a man to let her forget who the fuck she was for the sake of who he thinks he is. The book showcased her outgrowing her mental conditioning. The Hopkins Review 15,

Though Allen never mentions the phrase, the book is constantly circling and contending with the idea of the “Black ass lie.” I only recently came across this concept in Jamilah Lemieux’s incisive Vanity Fair essay titled “Dave Chappelle and ‘the Black Ass Lie’ That Keeps Us Down.” Lemieux sums up the concept this way: “Black America’s version of ‘the big lie’—‘the Black ass lie’—is that Black men have it worse than any other group of Black people.” Though the concept is new to me in name, it is only new in name. It’s certainly something you can feel, something you must work to unlearn if you’re a straight, cisgendered, Black man like me. Allen is often forced to confront this reality in her relationship with her father: I just wished men I have been born of listened when women—when I—have screamed stop. Instead of pretending we weren’t as urgent because he is the only one allowed to have problems. I wish men I have been born of understood I am a black woman in America, under him. With issues outside of him. With issues that stem directly from him. Because unlike everyone else around me who doesn’t look like me, I am not granted the privilege of being mediocre. The essay “Father Can You Hear Me” masterfully blends explorations of childhood, fatherhood, and masculinity. Although the focus is on Allen’s relationship with her father, she moves through a broader examination of fatherhood and childrearing by engaging in a kind of call and response with the language and theory of Kiese Laymon, who selected the book as the winner of the Iowa Prize for Literary Nonfiction in 2018. In his essay collection, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, Laymon takes aim at the familiar cudgel of “absent black fathers” when he writes, “Femiphobic diatribes and other bad books have gassed us with this idea that black boys need the presence of black father figures in our lives.” The next paragraph ends with this sentence, which Allen quotes and focuses on: "Black children need waves of present, multifaceted love, not simply present fathers.”Allen then responds, “This is true and I agree, we need multiple forces of outside love, but I also believe we need love in the home to know how to receive love secondarily.” And just two paragraphs later, she adds:

Boys need fathers so they won’t grow into adult boys who think women owe them something / so they won’t grow up to say they only date white girls because we’re too difficult / so they won’t grow up thinking they have to suppress any emotion that isn’t attached to a temper tantrum / black boys need black fathers so they won’t turn into another statistic.

I feel as Allen does when she says “I don’t know shit” in reference to being the authority on sexuality as a spectrum for her family. This is from the essay “Don’t Gaslight the Moonlight,” which is a moving, vulnerable exploration of the patriarchal and homophobic conditioning all too rampant in the Black church and Black community at large. “Homophobia is embedded into my culture, has threaded itself into our membranes, into our diets. I realized a lot of the preconceived notions I had were rooted in some absurd hateful fear instead of an extension of this freeing godliness everyone had been telling me is so flaw free in its forgiveness and acceptance,” Allen writes. Allen astutely brings up the movie Moonlight for its powerful ability to show Black folks themselves. Allen writes, “I kept returning to the theater because I kept seeing glimpses of myself and people I love in the characters.” This essay, like the rest of the book, moves to and through understanding, winding up at this arresting moment of clarity, “I began to realize how forgiving we are of black men hurting us, but remorseless toward the ways we hurt black men.” Later in the essay, she adds, “For me, Moonlight portrays in a sense, this outlandish concept of what a real man should be that has swallowed so many of our men in the process of trying to become it.”

When You Learn the Alphabet is a moving and wide-ranging examination of race, trauma, Black womanhood, masculinity, and pop culture. It’s fierce and unapologetic and asks necessary questions; it demands close rereadings. In some ways, I’m exactly the wrong person to review this book. In the same ways, I’m exactly the right person—Black, male, born into Christianity, carrying the Black ass lie in my bones. Like the movie Moonlight, Allen is dexterous and unflinching in her ability to

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Spring

Taken together, Allen seems to suggest that there are some things only fathers can instill in their children, and I’m not quite sure if this is true— maybe it is? However, here, we’re rocketing into areas beyond my expertise.

book review

show Black people to themselves, to show society to itself. Allen makes the constricting, negative lessons of racism and sexism explicit in her work; she makes plain what’s been learned and what needs to be unlearned.

Kendra Allen’s Unlearning Jalen Eutsey

Learning &

On The Death of Francis Bacon

Z. L. Nickels

On The Death of Francis Bacon, Z. L. Nickelsbook review

T hree sentences. Stamped on the back of a gorgeous dust jacket daubed with color. In-text, these sentences offer an invitation, the final words to a preparatory sketch for a series of never-to-be-completed oil-on-canvas paintings; out-of-text, they constitute a remarkably efficient back-cover blurb. A marketer’s triptych (and a publisher’s fantasy): location (Madrid), intrigue (Unfinished), and tension (Man Dying). The title, The Death of Francis Bacon, does the rest of the work. Hence, we realize, before ever nibbling the text, that Max Porter’s Francis Bacon is a singular figure—one just as garishly inscrutable as its real-world counterpart. Truly, a marvelous approach. Reason enough, even, to read Porter’s novel. But while it is ideal for the text, this approach is an anathema for any review.

It’s an attempt to get at the sense of what is looming up behind the person being hurt. It’s an attempt to keep the breast meat of the bird moist while the skin is crispy. It’s an attempt to express my feelings about a painter I have had a long unfashionable fixation with.It’s an attempt to get art history out of the way and let the paintings speak. It’s an attempt to hold catastrophe still so you can get a proper sniff at it. “Expression. Fixation. Art Speaking.” The literary review is a strange case of metonymy. For all its attempts at objectivity, it remains an overwhelmingly relational act: its purpose is to represent the text to potential readers, thereby casting the reviewer in the role of the author’s representative. Often, this representation is enacted without the author’s knowing; only later do they discover that someone else has been testifying to their text while they have been away, unable to properly speak. The act of review temporarily usurps the author’s position. It disrupts the hierarchy of The Death of Francis Bacon, by Max Porter (Penguin, 2021), 80 pp. “Madrid. Unfinished. Man Dying.”

Two Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion:

• Porter embraces transgression as early as the first painting, when his Bacon envisions his nurse suspended by a trapeze from the ceiling of his room, reciting a series of devastating critiques (“Bacon is a very Two Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion: On The Death of Francis Bacon, Z. L. Nickels

sending; the reader receives the review before ever receiving the text, thus solidifying the reviewer’s status as a necessary condition. What is the reviewer’s duty? To represent the text—to place it into frame, to paint the scene. But what if the text does not wish to be represented? What if the text is something with which our common language is unaccustomed or unequipped to handle? Then what? Did I draw this? Frame or bed, hole could be window, flesh could be flat, nobody looking, one body prostrate,another attending.

I received this novel at my address. Here, I am attempting to craft its representation. But it beguiles me at every opportunity; it mocks me in the way it evades my grasp of its objecthood. I am unable to fulfill my role as representative in the usual way, yet I am obliged to speak. Let me tell you what I know.

• In its most representational depiction, The Death of Francis Bacon is the story of the infamous painter, Francis Bacon, fixed in bed while a nurse attends to his death. Porter explores this narrative across one “preparatory sketch” and seven “paintings”—works that his Bacon struggles to finish in his mind as he lays dying. In another text, we would call these paintings “chapters.” It is unclear whether we could observe or read these paintings out of order; it is unclear why only the preparatory sketch has the disclaimer “non-existent”; it is unclear how Porter landed upon the dimensions of each piece. What is clear, however, is that this novel is a transgressive form.

• Porter introduces only two characters in The Death of Francis Bacon, which raises a curious question regarding point of view: how would this novel read if, instead of Bacon’s narrative, its story was filtered through the perspective of his nurse? This would indeed make for a less interesting work; though, I wonder from whom we would learn more.

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remarkable but not finally important painter . . . a brilliant stage manager rather than an original artist”) as he responds to her in kind (“ boring I know this. I know what you’re doing”). This will not be the last time Porter’s Bacon is haunted by his critics. In this way, he is transgressing himself.

• The transgressive form is relative and can only be understood within the context of what is being transgressed against. This is true whether we are discussing 74-page expressive “novels” or their subsequently expressive literary “reviews.” In this “review,” transgression is attempted through use of bullet points, forms of graphic notation that are not components of standard English grammar (q.v., The Best of the Prose Poem) or traditional reviews. When used correctly, therefore, we might consider them a proper linguistic tool for transgression.

• This text explores repetition through use of phrase. This is appropriate when examining an artist like Bacon who frequently returned to images and had a habit of titling works in succession (e.g., Pope I, Pope II, Pope III). Each of Porter’s “paintings” ends with the nurse’s warning, “Intenta descansar,” a loose English translation of which reads, “Try to rest.” Why govern the text with a coda of rest? It creates opposition. Porter’s Bacon cannot heed his nurse’s counsel, so long as he is fighting eternal rest. For if Francis Bacon rested, he would no longer be Francis Bacon.

• There is a painting of Bacon’s from the 1940s whose subject appears in profile the way Porter’s Bacon reads in the text. Do you remember it? No, not Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. Forget, for a moment, Aeschylus. Oil on canvas, 32" x 26", a principally gray palette.

• There is another fascinating use of repetition in this novel. It involves a question put forth in every painting, taking the form: “X or Francis Bacon?” (though, in later paintings, this order is reversed). As in: “the martyr Edward/Edward the Martyr/Julius Caesar/Mussolini/the corpse of Mussolini/Caravaggio/The Violent Death of the Painter Francis Bacon, London, 1979 or Francis Bacon?” It is unclear what Porter intends by asking these questions. I confess I do not know.

Two Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion: On The Death of Francis Bacon, Z. L. Nickels

• In the 1980s, a decade away from the death of the Francis Bacon, the artist painted a triptych of portraits of the wine merchant Jean-Pierre Moueix. Oil on canvas, 14" x 12" for each panel. The subject looks to be dissolving. Bacon was representing another figure; perhaps it was himself. Or perhaps he was anticipating the figure that would eventually be cast for him in this novel.

•

• Genius dies the same way as the rest of us: life trickles out slowly or otherwise blazes toward conclusion. Sometimes, there are others present. Other times, there are marked absences. Often there is regret. As Nietzsche said, all lives lead to the same death.

• While reading, it can be quite difficult to remember that Porter’s Francis Bacon is not the Francis Bacon. This slippage is a sign of linguistic expression as well as the author’s talent.

Do you remember the intensity of the subject? It would mean something if you did.

More commentary from Bacon’s nurse: “He is a flamboyant and brilliant liar who got lucky and found his medium.” More commentary from Bacon: “I invented things to make the interviews interesting, and sometimes as I said them, I realized they were true.” On occasion, both in this text and in the world, we can observe the interplay between invention and verisimilitude. This coupling is the foundation of figuration—it is also the foundation of painting.

• Finally, the end has come. An indelible figure of his present, Francis Bacon was obsessed with crucifixions of the past; living past Bacon’s death, Max Porter is obsessed with Francis Bacon. Another word for both crucifixion and obsession is “passion.” Porter pursues his passion in a literary present trapped in representation, but one cannot represent passion. It must be expressed: on a cross or through the transgressions of artists. It is in this way—and this way only—that Max Porter represents Francis Bacon. That is, passion is what leads us to ruin. Intenta descansar.

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• Genius dies nothing like the rest of us: with every unfinished canvas, the world despairs. All lives arrive at the same death, but all do not die the same. Especially for those who have “a horrid stabbing realistic knack of surviving.” The painter Francis Bacon is dead; by the end of The Death of Francis Bacon, so too is Porter’s. Each death is a painful loss.

The Transcendentalists and Their World, by Robert Gross (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021) 864 pp.

Emerson’s World: Concord and Discord, C. Diane Scharper book review C. Diane Scharper Emerson’s World: Concord and Discord

R alph Waldo Emerson found Concord, Massachusetts so inspiring that he wrote in his journal, “If God gave [me] my choice of the whole planet or my little farm, I should take my farm.”

Still, as a graduate of Harvard Divinity School, he disdained the town’s lack of spiritual awareness and its superficial sense of religion. Emerson lectured the town about the error of its ways. As the lectures became essays and then books, Emerson’s views exacerbated the many conflicts that had brewed in the town since its founding in 1635.

In that year, Simon Willard and Reverend Peter Bulkeley bought a sixmile square of land from the Pennacock Indian tribe, paying in white shell beads, hatchets, bows, knives, cotton cloth, and shirts for the area which would become the first Massachusetts Bay inland settlement.

The conflicting versions point to the many disputes that mark the history of Concord, Massachusetts. They affected almost every aspect of the town from its inception and include its newspapers, politics, educational methods, farming techniques, principles regarding abolition, beliefs about Freemasons, and the role of women in society.

According to one tradition, the deal was made under Jethro’s oak tree on Concord square beside the Middlesex hotel. Another tradition, however, says the bargain occurred on Lowell Road at Peter Bulkeley’s house. Each site has an historical marker attesting to the veracity of its history.

Situated at the confluence of the Sudbury and Assabet rivers, the town was originally called “Musketaquid,” meaning “grassy plain.” Impressed with the peaceful landscape, the early settlers changed the name to Concord, although from its history, it seems that Discord would have been a better name.

The settlers had problems early on, starting with the cold weather, which was not conducive to growing crops. The bitter weather took a toll on both the farmers and their livestock. They considered abandoning the town and consulted with their ministers who advised them to wait for God’s help. After they waited a few years, the settlers petitioned the court saying that God hadn’t helped and that they were nearly consumed by the poverty and

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meanness of the place. But they pressed on, eventually making Concord home to one of America’s most brilliant minds.

Focusing on the years 1825 to 1850, this history zigzags in time, showing how Concord changed from forest areas to farmlands, then to a mill center, and later a manufacturing and business community, gradually becoming a cultural, educational, political, literary, and religious hub.

Emeritus Professor Gross went to Concord in 1972 planning to write his dissertation. He intended to use the town as a case study in his broader research of community in the social and economic processes of New England during the first half of the nation. The dissertation evolved into The Minutemen and Their World, which came out in 1976 and won the prestigious Bancroft Prize. That history focuses on Concord as the setting for the American Revolutionary War.

Arguably, the bright spot in the settlement was its propinquity to Harvard College, set up in 1636. Situated about 16 miles from Cambridge, Concord became home to numerous Harvard graduates who found work there as teachers, lawyers, and preachers, and whose ideas changed the course of history—not just of Concord, but of the world. One such Harvard graduate was Ralph Waldo Emerson. Considered the Sage of Concord, Emerson was a celebrated American essayist, poet, lecturer, and the thought-leader of Transcendentalism, which writer Henry Adams called “Concord’s Church.” In Nature, Emerson depicts the transcendental experience poetically: “[M]y head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space. . . . I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part of God.”

* * * Robert Gross’s social history of Concord, The Transcendentalists and Their World, portrays Transcendentalism more pragmatically, as a blend of romantic, religious, poetic, and philosophical beliefs asserting that people have an intuitive realization of, and relationship with, nature and God: “It urged self-direction. . . . spurned authority and established institutions . . . [and] measured success by the loftiness of aims and the originality of results.”

A project taking approximately 40 years, Gross’s latest book sets up the parameters of the conflict between the town’s old ways and the new, the conservatives and the liberals, the orthodox and the reformers, the traditionalists and the rebels (like Emerson and Thoreau). Many people have contributed to this book’s content, including Gross’s graduate and undergraduate students. It grew out of several courses that he taught, but especially one at Amherst called Culture and Community: The Worlds of Emerson, Dickinson, and Thoreau.

The Transcendentalists and Their World begins where that book ends. Offering a painstaking reconstruction of citizens’ lives, work, and views on issues of the time, this book covers religion, politics, abolitionism, and women’s rights.

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Emerson’s World: Concord and Discord, C. Diane Scharper

Gross loosely shows how the town’s history affected Emerson’s thinking. He covers high and low points of Emerson’s career from his ordination to his falling out with the Unitarian Church, his resignation from the ministry, his involvement with Transcendentalists like Orestes Bronson, Margaret Fuller, and Bronson Alcott, as well as his relationship with Henry David Thoreau, whose life and work are showcased in the book’s final chapter.

Emerson had deep religious roots. Growing up, he lived in Boston and often visited the Concord home of his stepgrandfather, Pastor Ezra Ripley, the minister of the First Church in Concord. His own father was a minister, and his grandfather, Reverend William Emerson (1743–1776), was chosen as Concord’s pastor in 1765 and was chaplain of the Continental Army. He built his home, “The Old Manse,” near the North Bridge and encouraged the minutemen to defend Concord from the British. One of his daughters, Mary Moody Emerson, studied the theories of Transcendentalism and inspired the interest of her nephew, Waldo.

Each chapter covers an issue (e.g., “Husbandmen and Manufacturers”) that affected the people of the town. It explains who was involved, what they did, their take on the subject, those who opposed them, why they did so, and their take as well. He loads the text with minute details culled from documents, leases, pamphlets, religious circulars, newspaper articles, historical records, letters, and diaries regarding the small and large changes taking place as the town developed. Those changes, the book suggests, caused conflict and ultimately gave rise to the teachings of Concord’s most respected thinker, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Emerson has a primary role in Gross’s sprawling 836-page history. But Gross generally keeps Emerson at a distance, showing him from the outside, noting what he did, but spending little time on what he wrote and thought.

As the book opens, the town has resolved that the first shot of the Revolutionary War actually happened in Concord at the old North Bridge and has decided on a memorial stone to the minutemen who fought there. There had been arguments over whether the shot was fired in Lexington or Concord. After the war ended, the town continued to debate the issue, finally deciding that this shot was fired not in Lexington but in Concord. The next conflict involved deciding the type of monument that would be appropriate for the occasion. Once the problem was resolved, Emerson, who was asked to speak at the laying of the memorial stone, wrote “Concord Hymn” for the occasion.

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As Gross describes it, Emerson distributed his poem on six-inch squares of paper, and the town sang in celebration to the tune of “Old Hundredth,” a Puritan hymn based on the 100th psalm. The words of Emerson’s hymn (not included in the book) set the mood and capture the spirit of this major event in Concord and U.S. history from its first stanza:

Emerson’s protégé, Henry David Thoreau, a Harvard graduate, noted that book review Hopkins 15, 02, 2022

By the rude bridge that arched the flood, Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled, Here once the embattled farmers stood And fired the shot heard round the world.

Readers may want to reference Emerson’s essays to better understand him and the transcendental movement.

(“Concord Hymn,” Sung at the Completion of the Battle Monument, July 4, 1837)

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He was also inspired by the poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth and their transcendental themes. Gross does not include poems by the two Romantic poets, although these would have enlivened his somewhat dry prose. In addition, he was also influenced by the essays of Thomas Carlyle and Emmanuel Swedenborg, a mystic who believed that the power and life within nature and all creation is God.

Other characters in this book include William Munroe, a pencil-maker like John Thoreau (1787–1859), Henry David’s father; Daniel Shattuck, successful Concord businessman; and his brother Lemuel Shattuck who became a publisher and one of the first historians of Concord, publishing History of Concord, a record of “homely details” affecting the village.

Emerson’s World: Concord and Discord, C. Diane Scharper he had been born into “the most estimable place [Concord] in all the world and in the very nick of time too.” But he often disagreed with Concord’s religious, educational, and political views. As he once put it, “The ringing of the church bell is a much more melodious sound than any that is heard within the church.” Thoreau believed Concord’s system of education and corporal punishment were wrong and resigned from his teaching assignment shortly after he was chastised for not beating his students. He didn’t vote or run for office and kept his distance from political issues— unlike his mentor, Emerson.

Two Black families—the Robbins and the Garrisons—were central to Concord history and its efforts to abolish slavery and educate freemen. One of the town’s anecdotes includes a story about Ellen Garrison and her white friend, Abigail Prescott, marching hand-in-hand during the Concord Bicentennial Parade of 1835.

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Gross shows that Thoreau had wanted to commune with nature, to live beside Walden Pond, and to write about the experience. Emerson, however, discouraged him from doing so, which strained their relationship. Instead, he urged Thoreau to edit and translate the works of others for the Transcendentalist publication The Dial, whose editor, Margaret Fuller, accepted only a few of Thoreau’s poems for the magazine. When Emerson took over as editor, though, he published more of Thoreau’s work, which arguably improved their relationship.

Women, unfortunately, receive short shrift in this history—as they

John Keyes, a Jeffersonian Republican and then a Whig, served numerous roles in the town history including postmaster, treasurer, and state senator. A leader of the Freemasons, he fought the policies of the AntiMasons who opposed the secrecy of Masonic rituals. There’s also Samuel Hoar, a town leader, who provoked arguments with his support of the Congregationalists, chartered corporations, and the textile industry.

The Reverend Ezra Ripley, who considered himself an ambassador for Christ, was one of the most notable Concord residents, and rightfully book review

New England abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896) is not included, even though the book spotlights her father, Reverend Lyman Beecher, and his work as an abolitionist and minister. Yet her novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, was one of the most popular books of the 19th century and propelled the abolitionist cause by showing the evils of slavery. She may not have been a Transcendentalist, but she was part of their world.

It’s disconcerting that Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) is ignored here, while Asa Dickinson, her relative who also lived in Amherst, is mentioned regarding trivial cash payments made to his place of business. Unique partly because of its transcendental themes, Dickinson’s poetry would have been a refreshing addition to this history—such as the poem “I taste a liquor never brewed,” which suggests nature as an all-consuming presence.

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Editor Margaret Fuller (The Dial) plays a smaller-than-life part in this history. Gross’s treatment mostly regards her connections to Bronson Alcott, Thoreau, and Emerson, whom she dubbed “The Sage of Concord.” But her writing is ignored. Yet she was the first female war correspondent and wrote for Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune. She was also a poet, a full-time book reviewer, and the author of the first feminist study, Woman in the Nineteenth Century Gross highlights Bronson Alcott but disregards his daughter, the acclaimed novelist and poet Louisa May Alcott. Most readers would expect to hear about her, since she was friends with Thoreau and Emerson. She wrote for the Atlantic Monthly starting in 1860. Her 1863 poem “Thoreau’s Flute,” with its transcendental themes, memorialized Henry David Thoreau: “His life the eternal life commands; / Above man’s aims his nature rose.” He had been her teacher. Some say the two were in love.

did in 19th century Concord. The exception seems to be Mary Merrick Brooks, who, although descended from three generations of Massachusetts slaveholders, embraced abolitionism and was a member of Concord’s Female Anti-Slavery Society. A close friend of Thoreau’s mother and sister, Brooks was able to convince Emerson to take a strong stand against slavery when his wife, Lidian, could not.

plays a prominent role in this book. He served as minister of the First Parish in Concord for almost 63 years, during which his teachings guided the citizens of Concord. Somewhat pedantic, he possessed a spiritual authority which elevated the moral climate of the town, as evidenced in his 21 sermons on “the social virtues and moral duties” of Christians. Subjects included candor, charity, peacefulness, friendship, and the duties of parents for their children, and of children for their parents. There were also duties that insured order: reverence for authority, obedience to law, and subordination to superiors. Above all were the duties of gratitude to God. His notions of conformity and duty collided with Emerson’s sense of a pervasive spirituality uniting all creation. According to Emerson, Ripley “was engaged to the old forms of the New England church.” Emerson, though, rebelled against these forms. * * *

Emerson’s World: Concord and Discord, C. Diane Scharper

The conflicts wracking the town stemmed from religious disputes ignited as the Transcendentalists challenged the beliefs of the Unitarians and Trinitarians.

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Although both traced their origins back to the Puritans, Unitarians believed in the primacy of one God; the Trinitarians believed in three persons in one God. The Transcendentalists had a mystical and poetic take on the divine. They believed that all creation was one and interconnected to God and nature, and that humanity was innately good, as opposed to the traditional Christian concept that people were mired in original sin and predestined to hell except for aMostfew.

Concord ministers, including Reverend Ripley, taught religion by studying the Bible and religious theories of the past. But Emerson believed that this approach to religion was empty. He taught religion through intuition, believing that the future is now and that what is essential is within each one of us.

Emerson took spiritual teaching seriously and seethed when he heard a poorly-written or poorly-delivered sermon. He resigned from the ministry at age 29 and later stopped attending church services because of the poor quality of the sermons. Emerson thought that Reverend Ripley’s sermons were boring but authentic.

As Emerson saw it, churches should draw out humankind’s astonishment at an inner connection to an Over-Soul of which all individuals were a part. He believed that the ego was only a small part of a person. The soul, though, was immortal and beautiful and more significant than the ego. He taught that all souls were related to each other and to God.

The sermons of Ripley’s replacement, Pastor Barzillai Frost, however, were stale and shallow according to Emerson. When he and his wife brought their six-month-old son, Waldo, for baptism, Emerson fumed in his diary that Frost had not uttered “one, single, penetrating word” of instruction. His sermon consisted in “page after page of clichés.” He thought Frost spoke “from his ears, his memory, and never his soul.”

The idioms of [Jesus’] language, and the figures of his rhetoric, have usurped the place of his truth; and churches are not built on his principles, but on his tropes. . . . [The] word Miracle, as pronounced by Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is Monster. It is not one with the blowing clover and the falling rain.

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Careful readers will want to read the address for themselves to notice the passion of Emerson’s words as well as his style, blending his thoughts regarding Christianity with a nature metaphor and thereby enhancing both.

Emerson believed that “the true preacher deals out to the people his life,— life passed through the fire of thought.”

Emerson expounded on his criticisms of preaching in his Harvard Divinity School Address and set off a firestorm of arguments among members of the town and the church. Harvard itself disagreed with Emerson and did not ask him to speak again until many years later. In the address, which Gross briefly discusses but does not include, Emerson excoriates the church for distorting the truths of Christ rather than revealing them:

Gaining recognition as a major writer, orator, scholar and poet, Emerson lectured widely, including trips to Connecticut, New York State, Maine, Florida, Virginia, and New Hampshire. In Baltimore, he spoke to audiences at the First Unitarian Church, the Peabody Institute, and the Baltimore Mercantile Library Association, which was partly funded by Daniel Coit Gilman, the first president of Johns Hopkins University, and John McCoy, a major Hopkins benefactor.

The iconic American poet Walt Whitman also attended Emerson’s lectures in Baltimore. Emerson had delighted in Whitman’s poems with their emphasis on the individual and the connectedness between people and nature, as in Whitman’s self-published Leaves of Grass: “Come, said my soul, / Such verses for my Body let us write, (for we are one,). . . .” Upon receiving a copy, Emerson responded, “I greet you at the beginning of a great career,” which was a self-fulfilling prophecy partly because Whitman published Emerson’s comments, thereby enhancing his own poetic reputation.

Six feet tall, slender but bony, Emerson, as Gross describes him, looked like a Yankee schoolmaster in his frock coat and cravat. One can almost hear his rich baritone commanding the room and taking his audience along on an intellectual journey. He didn’t offer asides or tell any jokes. He was composed and avoided “the pathetic tones” popular at the time. His dark blue eyes intent on reading the manuscript before him, Emerson spoke for 50 minutes, as if discovering his words for the first time and “with the same feelings he had experienced in their composition.”

Young men and women were enthralled by Emerson’s words as he insisted on “the right of every soul to ‘interpret for itself the meaning of life, untrammeled by tradition and conventions.’” As a Harvard student, poet James Russell Lowell remembered listening to Emerson’s “thrilling voice so charged with subtle meaning and subtle music.”

According to Lowell, Emerson inspired his audience, awakening them “to his insights and epiphanies as their own.” He certainly transformed the young Lowell, as Gross writes, giving new meaning to the title Sage of Concord:It was as if he [Lowell] and his contemporaries had been adrift on an uncharted sea; then Emerson came on the scene and they responded like “shipwrecked men on a raft to the hail of a ship that came with unhoped for food and rescue.”

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Emerson’s World: Concord and Discord, C. Diane Scharper

The Violent, Complicated, and Mythbusting Lives of Women, Samantha Neugebauer

Burning Girls, by Veronica Schanoes (Tordotcom, 2021), 333 pp.

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The Violent, Complicated, and Mythbusting

Lives of Women

How to Wrestle a Girl, by Venita Blackburn (mcd x fsg Originals, 2021), 207 pp.

I n three new story collections, Burning Girls by Veronica Schanoes, How to Wrestle a Girl by Venita Blackburn, and Shit Cassandra Saw by Gwen E. Kirby, their authors attempt to make sense of contemporary womanhood. Schanoes, Blackburn, and Kirby mix genres, combining aspects of realism with fantasy, and real-life celebrities with mythological characters. In Burning Girls, Schanoes adopts an omnipresent fairytale cadence, but it is Kirby who most successfully utilizes mythology to frame her stories and explain her antiheroes’ strained existences. Similarly, Blackburn’s stories zoom in on the granular ways women and young girls assess and devour one another. In this way, each collection is full of frustration, vengeance, and at times, incendiary nihilism.

In her 2019 Nobel Lecture in Literature, writer Olga Tokarczuk said that we occupy a “new, drawn-out, and disordered rhythm of the world.” This reality is exemplified in the prose styles of Blackburn and Kirby. Breathless pacing, run-on sentences, and lists mark their stories. In particular, Blackburn reveals how virtual behaviors overlap with people’s processing in the physical world. At a high school graduation party in “Fam,” for example, the narrator is thinking about how her “lil sister/niece/granddaughter/baby cousin doesn’t know that she’s pretty, so she asks everybody, one post at a time.” Throughout the flash story, the “she” is a collective, undistinguished. There is also nostalgia for a different kind of existence. “She used to walk around like a Black Quasimodo: loved and gorgeous,” Blackburn writes later in the story, and its impossible for the reader not to want to know this flawed woman. We may assume the narrator is talking about her mother in that line, but it is also possible she is referring to another member of her female collective. What follows is a technique similar to Bo Burnham’s song “White Woman’s Instagram,” whereby Blackburn recreates common posts

Shit Cassandra Saw, by Gwen E. Kirby (Penguin Books, 2022), 269 pp.

Samantha Neugebauer

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Schanoes’s book has more moments like this, where a woman’s survivalist instinct is blended with tenderness and confusion. Unlike Blackburn and Kirby’s narrators, Schanoes’s protagonists seem to believe some kind of narrative cohesion and sensemaking is possible. In “Serpents,” Charlotte, who “likes snakes” wonders if “the world is a snake as well.” She explains that she wouldn’t mind being a “smaller snake inside the belly of a larger snake undulating through time and space. The past would be the tail and the future the head, and the massive sinuous body would coil and curve over and under and through itself . . . the world-serpent would hold its tail in its mouth, a tale in its mouth, its tale in its mouth.” In the forward to the collection, Jane Yolen cites Schanoes’s expertise in fairytales and folklore as influences, as well as her knowledge of Jewish fabulism.

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The Violent, Complicated, and Mythbusting Lives of Women, Samantha Neugebauer from her “she.” At the end, a moment of humanization comes, except unlike how Burnham’s narrator decides to show you the hurt and behaviors of his “she” as a response to the loss of a loving mother, Blackburn’s narrator’s mother “punches you in the chest for reasons too small to see with the naked eye,” and she concludes that “in the machine there is no blood, no bone, and no Meanwhile,fat.”Kirby’s stories are an oracular, technological, and bionic fantasia. “Cassandra is done, full the fuck up, soul weary,” Kirby writes in her opening story, before listing a series of prophesies. Although it is not explicitly stated, each subsequent story in the collection is set up to be read as another of Cassandra’s unbelievable prophesies. It is a fascinating choice that makes it both delightful and understandable when we dip into a mélange of stories set in the past, present, and future: Boudicca from AD 61, a woman hanged for witchcraft in 1594, Nakano Takeko in 1868, a millennial-aged American girl on a school trip to Mexico, and a future world where, Peter-Parker-style, unnamed women are bitten by radioactive cockroaches. In this futurist story, the streets become safer for women as they overrun with witches, female werewolves, clawed, shapeshifting women, and alien mothers. At the end, however, after two transformed women walking down a street see a man “respectfully” nod and give them “a wide berth,” we are told, “They are proud of what they’ve done. But still, sometimes, they wish they could be smooth and whole, some softer version of themselves.”

All of which is apparent in her most harrowing stories, such as “Among the Thorns,” based on the oft-forgotten Grimm’s tale “The Jew in the Thorns.” Schanoes’s retelling opens with, “They made my father dance in thorns before they killed him,” and from there, we meet our heroine, a pawnbroker’s daughter in 16th-century Germany, who lives in a mixed town of Jews and Christians. The daughter tells us, “The Christian children were nice enough, but they were scared of us sometimes, or scorned us, and I never knew what to expect.” Her father “drank and smoked with the younger Christian men,” but later, on the road, he is tortured and murdered for crimes he didn’t commit, which include “mutilating their Eucharist” and plotting to poison the Christians. As an adult, the narrator, who is both compassionate and intelligent, seeks her revenge with the help of Matronit, “the goddess-mother of all children of Israel.” Like this, in many of Schanoes’s stories, young girls lead the way, while a metavoice (Schanoes’s own) hovers at the edges, appearing sometimes with historical clarity and academic punctures, as in “Emma Goldman Takes Tea with the Baba Yaga,” where readers are given a stirring rundown on Marxism, with at one point our narrator saying, “You do not achieve freedom by abridging people’s rights; you do not create joy by enforcing suffering. The means do become the ends, because there is no end. There are just ongoing moments.”

Like Schanoes, Blackburn is at her best when the voices of young characters enter her stories. In “Lisa Bonet,” Blackburn’s narrator recalls as a child being taught, “Martin Luther King Jr. was not a perfect man but led a perfect cause,” and the child thinking, “[mlk Jr.] was bad at math and not bad at fidelity or fatherhood. There were lives at stake so you had to stay quiet.” It’s a beautiful, truthful moment that shows the disservice done when a classroom (or a country) expects silence and self-censorship. Then, there’s “Difficult Subjects,” in which another child narrator tells us about Mrs. Merriweather, their grade-school teacher who is waiting on approvals to teach the things that “weren’t in the textbooks the way they should be.” Readers don’t see those lessons on the page. We are, however, privy to the way the narrator’s imagination takes flight without such lessons. When another class brings in a turkey to learn about “propaganda,” the narrator explains, “I always thought of turkeys like sexless holiday gods; they were

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The scene is humorous; at the same time, the humor banks on the reader knowing the connection between propaganda and turkeys, which implies that at some point, many Mrs. Merriweather types have succeeded. Yet, readers never get to see characters making decisions about what to do with hard-earned knowledge and history. How to Wrestle a Girl also features a string of characters who are (sometimes) self-aware of their own or other’s body-shaming tendencies but ultimately do not engage with them. This disengagement felt unintentional yet weighted. In “Live Birth,” for example, the line “Her daughters got degrees and got fat,” and in “Inappropriate Gifts”: “[Darrell] ran his palms down over his chest to press the flesh deeper inside as if the fat, the almostbreasts, were a wrinkle that could straighten with pressure.” Even in “Fat,” where a young narrator is annoyed when her white coach “comment[s] on [her] medically insignificant weight gain” and briefly considers what course of action to take, nothing comes of her considerations. On one end, it is heartbreaking because the character has recently lost her father and her mother is depressed, but on the other hand, the narration seems uninterested in exploring the topic they have taken on. The story ends with another female concluding that “yeah, kinda,” the narrator has gained weight, but we are left without comment or insight from our narrator. In the same vein, some of Kirby’s stories place the reader in truly precarious and comical situations—“For a Good Time, Call” is fun in both regards. But most stories end before a character’s self-awareness can transform into action or atonement. In one of her longest and most compelling stories, “Here Preached His Last,” an unnamed woman (a wife, mother, teacher, and varsity soccer coach) is having an affair while also being visited by the ghost of George Whitefield. “For a few glorious months,” the narrator tells us, “I feel like I am getting away with something, fucking Karl and still living my boring life.” We learn that the woman’s husband travels a lot on business, and that she feels disconnected from her daughter, who is a “happy, well-adjusted child.” She yearns to tell her daughter that “nothing matters,” but she wavers, because she “suppose[s] that’s not what I mean.” Throughout the story, there is great dialogue from George Whitefield, but

The Violent, Complicated, and Mythbusting Lives of Women, Samantha Neugebauer beyond me and inside of me like Christmas carols and Christmas ham.”

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the narrator seems very much in the same state at the end. She continues to be morally ambivalent, and is, perhaps, on a surer descent into solipsism. Furthermore, Cassandra, as some readers might expect, is not evoked again at the end of collection, which feels like a missed opportunity for a nested narrative, whereby the prophetess could reappear to either rally her despitethe-odds believers or insist on the worthwhileness of her unbelievable echoes of Withintruth.allthree collections, there is language play and sport, which mirrors the tone of the writers’ individual stories. Schanoes’s prose can be recursive and stylized, reminiscent of girlhood games like Ring Around the Rosie. Blackburn’s prose is lively and fully engaged in the moment, like her eponymous girl wrestler, who “because of the pain in her head . . . is not thinking about tomorrow, only this hour and your throat and how soft it is. . . .” And Kirby’s prose is lifted by a kind of team spirit, a spirit comprised of all the Cassandras out there, who perceive themselves part of a battle without ending.

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CELEBRATING JOHN BARTH John Barth Navigation Stars Gina Apostol May Your Muse Still Be Singing Jennifer Finney Boylan On with the Story! R. L. Friedman Jack but Not John Barth Michael Martone Gunkholing: An Anecdotary 155 158 164 169 172 Photo used by permission of The Wylie Agency

155 Navigation Stars from postscripts: just desserts (Dalkey Archive Press, October 11, 2022), John Barth essay

John Barth Navigation Stars from postscripts : just desserts (Dalkey Archive Press, October 11, 2022). Copyright © 2022 by John Barth. T he firmament of literature is ablaze with stars of every magnitude: too many even to count, much less to read. But just as celestial navigators of old chose from that dazzling overabundance certain first-magnitude beacons to steer by, writers of fiction or poetry will have been significantly influenced by particular predecessors, as well as by particular life events, mentors, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and other circumstances, and will consciously, half-consciously, or unconsciously steer by those stars through their artistic odyssey.

Speaking of which (the Odyssey): my own short list of principal literary navigation-stars begins with Homer’s Odysseus, the paragon and prototype of the Mythic Wandering Hero, as famously defined by Joseph Campbell. Homer’s epic Iliad impressed but never much moved me: those crazy-jealous Olympian deities, the slam-bang warfare, the Trojan Horse gimmick. . . . But the post-war Odyssey, with its stressed-out veteran’s long journey home, his temptations and seductions by Circe and the Sirens and his resourceful dealing with them (plugging his shipmates’ ears against the Sirens’ irresistible calls, e.g., but lashing himself to his ship’s mast with ears unplugged in order to hear the Sirens’ song but not be seduced thereby), and his equally resourceful wife Penelope’s strategy of forestalling her persistent suitors by endlessly unweaving and reweaving her web—brilliant!

And a hard act to follow, as they say in showbiz. But my second navigation-star (historically second, not second in importance: these four are equally important to me) follows Homer easily by being nothing like him: It’s Anonymous’s Scheherazade, the heroine of the Kitab alf laylah wa-laylah, or Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night, or The Arabian Nights, depending on the translator. Scheherazade’s bedtime stories to her homicidally demented royal spouse are certainly entertaining, but her entertain-meor-die “ground-situation”—the oral-narrative equivalent to “publish or perish”—is what sets Nights apart from such other admirable tale-cycles as Boccaccio’s Decameron and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, with their multiple tale-tellers: They tell their tales to stave off boredom; she tells hers to save her life and her country. I came to know Ms. Scheherazade (and Boccaccio and Chaucer and many another yarn-spinner) as a very green undergraduate student at Johns Hopkins University, helping to defray my tuition expenses

The consensus of the class was that it was when Quixote mistakes the windmills for giants, attacks them on horseback with his lance, and gets knocked to the ground, but seeing Salinas smile in a certain way, I bethought myself and ventured that it was much earlier than that: well before he sets out astride Rocinante with his sidekick Sancho Panza astride his donkey, Quixote in preparing his armor improvises a helmet-visor from paper and tests it with his sword; when it cuts easily in half, he makes another just like it, but this time declares it satisfactory and dons it without repeating the test. Perhaps that’s the telling moment?

Navigation Stars from postscripts: just desserts (Dalkey October 11, 2022), John Barth essay by working part-time as a book-filer in the university’s “classics” library and not infrequently borrowing from the return-cart items not included in my course curriculum: such genre-busting (or at least genre-stretching) marvels as Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, Somadeva’s Ocean of Story, Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Diderot’s Jacques the Fatalist and his Master, and many another. Star #3 is less dramatic, but no less richly entertaining: Cervantes’s Don Quixote. Him too I first met as an undergrad, not this time on the book-return cart but in a wonderful “Great Books” course in which we studied each item with a professor whose specialty it was: Dante’s Divine Comedy with Charles S. Singleton, Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain with Leo Spitzer (a refugee from Hitler’s Germany) and DQ with Pedro Salinas, an elderly poet-refugee from the fascist Spain of Generalissimo Francisco Franco. Splendid mentors all, and I have a particularly fond memory of reading Cervantes with Salinas en español, not only because I so enjoyed that book and that professor—I enjoyed them all!—but because of a moment especially felicitous for a callow undergraduate like my then-self, less prepared than my classmates who’d graduated from good urban high schools or private schools, unlike my poor dear rural high school, which back then didn’t even have a 12th grade. “When is the first moment in the book,” Salinas asked us, “When Don Quixote acts on his mad delusion of knight-errantry?”

Archive Press,

Salinas smiled, then said in effect that in the lengthy history of commentaries on Don Quixote, to his knowledge only two have remarked that moment: “Myself, and now Señor Barth.” I’m sure I must have blushed with embarrassed pride; even at 60-plus years later, his compliment still

My fourth (and final) chief literary navigation-star is Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, the raffish, mischievous, juvenile, and very American equivalent of Odysseus and Quixote. Like them, he rambles—not over seas and plains, but down America’s central artery, the Mississippi; not on a ship or a horse, but aboard a makeshift raft; and not with Squire Sancho Panza as a sidekick, but with the no less memorable Jim. While Huck is not half-crazy like Quixote, not dealing with monsters, gods, and demons like Odysseus, and not yarning to save the show like Scheherazade and Homer’s Penelope, he epitomizes adolescent rebelliousness in its American flavor. Twain’s Tom Sawyer is a fine novel; its sequel is a navigation-star masterpiece.So.Odysseus,

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tingles in my memory. I like to think that it may have inspired me to imagine that I too might someday become a writer, and I know for a fact that it encouraged me as a professor to remark and praise in class analogous insights by my students. Muchas gracias, Don Pedro!

Scheherazade, Quixote, and Huck: the North/East/ South/West of my literary compass, with whose aid I steer my own course from project to project. Thank you, maestros!

For Jack

I had researched his office address from pamphlets at Thomas Jefferson after I had read an article he wrote in Harper’s called “Teacher.” Buendia Avenue was off of edsa, the 24-kilometer-long street of our discontent.

I remember arriving at Hopkins suspecting every man with a smooth brow, ruddy cheeks, a tweed jacket, and a sailor’s hat to be John Barth. I had just arrived on the Homewood campus from the Philippines, and there were so many white men being John Barth that the most ordinary encounter with strangers was a potential thrill. I knew his face from dust jackets at the Thomas Jefferson Cultural Center, the US embassy’s outpost on Buendia Avenue in Manila’s business district. It’s serendipitous—a very Barthian, Scheherazadian word, to be sure—to be writing about Jack now when I’m on a US book tour (virtually, of course) for Bibliolepsy, the novel-in-progress I sent him in 1986 during the height of a street rebellion, now called the edsa People Power Revolt, that kicked the Marcoses out of my country. The fan letter (with ms attached!) that I wrote to Mister John Barth was a shot in the dark as indeterminate as the outcome of our protests.

I used to take a recess from revolution to read books and magazines. I was a 22-year-old kid from a far-flung, obscure island city, Tacloban, marching with the Maoists in Manila, but I’d also just graduated from an English department, with typewritten sheaves of a manuscript about books and reading in my backpack along with leaflets of rebellion. Among the American books I loved most in that library on Buendia were The Floating Opera and Chimera. For me, Barth made American literature relevant. Reading John Barth was like entering a world of ambitious invention that the world of the street echoed, in its different way: in the art of Barth’s books was also a way for me to be free. I was very surprised, reading the essay in Harper’s, that the magician of Chimera was human, with a possible office address, a second identity beyond art, and an earthly vocation: teaching. Looking back now, it’s even odder that I thought I could then just write to this magician-slash-teacher and send him my novel.

What is magical, in fact, is that John Barth wrote me back. In recalling Jack, my memory is suffused simply by my remembrance essay

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© 2022 Gina Apostol 159 of his generosity. That is all. That he wrote this clueless rebel back. That he took the time to enclose an application form. That he suggested, with the gentlest tone of bemusement at my audacity, also known as ignorance, in writing straight to him, that I should redirect my novel to the Writing Seminars. My letter from John Barth, the missive received in Manila from the Andromeda Galaxy, told me that I would be a writer. The first sight of him at the seminar table had that mystical quality that must have struck all 10 of us in class—my fellow writers, whom I still consider friends, were 20-something hotshots from Harvard, Princeton, Williams, Wesleyan, Hopkins, Goucher, Tulane, Cornell, and Brown (I was the only brown person, the only foreigner, and the only one not educated in a private college—though this singularity never occurred to me then: we were all just classmates). Whatever aggrandized figure we thought we were, Jack’s appearance at last at the table was the denouement of our collective, expectant awe. We talked about this often beforehand, at the welcome parties—what would he be like? He was not wearing his sailor’s hat, he was leaner than in his page-sized Chimera library-book dust jacket, and I remember one classmate was late—she told me afterward she had been circling the hallway, nervous. When she came in, Jack said, “And you must be Caragh O’Brien.” Her response was perfect: “And you must be John Barth.” And so he was.

To be in Jack’s presence was to summon up your swagger to dispel your nerves. Workshop was driven by his silence. He rarely spoke in class; he spoke before it. We each had private conferences with him before our stories were up. This was a balm. For me it was his voice that mattered. Your amulet in class was that he told you what mattered before workshop had begun. Even now, years later, writers I admire will ask with genuine curiosity—so what was it like to be advised in narrative by John Barth? And I realize again my absurd privilege: to have been taught narrative by that supreme narrator, John Barth. The fact is, he never told me what to do. His tact was my guide. He told me where plot began; he told me there was a difference between “further” and “farther”; he asked me, “Have you heard of this great Filipino writer [he] had just met, Jessica Hagedorn?” He told me about shaking hands with Borges; he told me a novel is made of time; essay

160 © 2022 Gina Apostol May Your Muse Still Be Singing, Gina Apostol he told me to read Machado de Assis; he told me after the end of the oneyear program, “This is it, Gina. Do not go back to school—now you just write.” As any of his students will tell you, he also repeated—grist for the mill! Everything is grist for the mill! But above all, he said brava The frisson of one’s conferences with Jack lay in that succinct squiggle of his scribbled praise: his term “bravo.” You looked for it when you got your story back. You treasured it. You went back to it when your swagger faltered. That short word in his careful hand: “bravo.” That’s how I knew he read by the sentence. “Bravo” told me that line was well turned. “Bravo” said that word made that line turn well. In one conference, he told me I had this knack for finding a way to the surprising, precise phrase, but my paragraph acted as if I were not aiming for it: his examples are on page 15 and 19 in Bibliolepsy’s US edition. I took that as a compliment, because why not? (Next term, of course, Dixon told me I was a mess. Par for the course in graduate workshops!) Maybe I learned from “bravo” the things I valued: precision, but also surprise. It was Jack’s quite catholic appreciation that often returned my audacity to me. I’m not gonna lie: I have carried them in my mind—Jack’s squiggles on my bravura—as talismans. They’ve kept me going in the years when, in fact, I ended up not being able to write. My memory of Hopkins is inextricable from my life with my late husband Arne Tangherlini, also Jack’s student, one of the 10 in the graduate fiction class. He was the Harvard boy from Worcester, Massachusetts, who spoke seven languages—the better to boss the physics grad students on his Hopkins pickup team, soccer being his other love. He brought up words like “ontogeny” and “phylogeny” to talk about story structures. He wrote about Italian deli workers making American hero sandwiches and Danish folklorists scavenging identities from grandmothers’ tales. His kindness rivaled his smartness. He’s the only one who read all the stories John Irwin assigned. He thought not reading was disrespect. He was the most beautiful man. His ability to listen was legend, equal to his ability to come up with his own outrageous stories, like filing manuscripts in an Italian castle for Ezra Pound’s daughter, a fascist countess, or swimming naked under the shadow of Mount Athos to the chagrin of a bunch of Greek Orthodox monks. People loved Arne and Arne loved people. What drew us essay

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My last messages from Jack have been electronic—gone are the days of indelible cursive, his looped and welcome J’s. In one exchange, he forwarded to me his very generous letter to his agent about my second novel, The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata, for which, as he said, he “broke his house rules”—he gave me a blurb for a non-US edition of a book. Footnote: even Jack’s effusive word could not get such a complex book essay Hopkins

© 2022 Gina Apostol 161 to him was that his embrace of life was total. Arne and I grew up together as writers from our time at Hopkins, and in that way of couples, our memories of the Seminars had that resonance of our retellings to each other of incidents in the year we met. Arne had a theory that Jack kept index cards with personal info about his students that he consulted before every conference. “He’s so Germanic,” Arne would say—his memory is so precise. “How come he remembers I studied Gramsci and the factory occupations in Turin in the 1920s?” Arne marveled. Every time he visited Jack, Arne told me he scanned his office for Jack’s secret index cards. I told him to look in his breast pockets. In our marriage, Jack was the major character in the snow-globe Hopkins of our shared recall—and thus also a figure of our shared promise and ambition. My files, if I ever find them again, have many Jack autographs— the high, sweeping camber of his J’s on thick notepaper; one is a recommendation addressed to the editor of Dumbarton Press for my first job out of grad school. (Being from an old settler Chesapeake family, she was starstruck to be getting Barth’s autograph, even if only for a reference letter.) Another is Jack’s note on learning of our move from Baltimore to Manila in 1992, when it was clear to me, having a new baby, that I could not write without help from my family at home. I kept Jack’s note when we returned to America and I sent him the first copy of the finally finished Bibliolepsy, published by the press at my alma mater, The University of the Philippines. The one I’d like to see again is the note Jack sent when he heard of Arne’s death. I remember how much it meant to me, his letter, amid shock’s fog and strangers’ sympathy, as if Jack were somehow kin to my grief, because there was after all that thread of my husband’s memory so tied to the world of our young ambition, the swagger summoned by being in Jack’s class.

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May Your Muse Still Be Singing, Gina Apostol about the Philippines read, much less published, back in 2008—it came out in the US, in a different publishing atmosphere, in 2021. But what’s good about email is that I can retrieve Jack’s last message. Therefore I can quote it. It’s dated November 14, 2013. Subject: Hello Gina. It begins abruptly, as he does: Jack Barth here. And he continues: “Shocked by the dreadful news from the Philippines and hoping at least that you & yours are safe (got your e-mail address from jhu).” Later, Tristan Davies would tell me how in early November that year, out of the blue he got these requests from Jack for my email and scrambled to find the right one as I had moved so much. What Tristan did not know was that a super typhoon, Haiyan, had leveled my hometown on November third, killing 10,000 in a matter of minutes. The letter noted: “It’s been difficult to read about Tacloban and the eastern towns and see the camera reports.” Jack’s letter ended: “May your muse still be singing; I’d like to hear from you.”

I still cry reading this letter. As Arne used to say—how could his memory be so precise? I had not seen Jack since I left Baltimore: though through the years I would send him my books—and yes, I once asked for a blurb for a non-US edition, despite knowing his house rules. (I remain audacious.) But he remembered my city. He remembered that Tacloban was my hometown. And he reached out though he, too, was in the middle of change. He and Shelly were uprooting to Florida, “reluctantly shifting here year-round from our Maryland summer address.” The line was nonchalant, but I thought, What a wrench for Jack to leave the Chesapeake. Even so, he did not forget to condole. In my life, those moments when wild things happened, Jack condoled. And at that moment, so did Shelly: she wrote an addendum to his letter on the typhoon. One can only imagine how much of Jack’s strengths came also from Shelly’s presence. As I said, what I remember above all about Jack is generosity: it is odd when one looks back on one’s life, and a figure so monumental is someone you will never quite know, but the sense of intimacy is real because it’s also true that he has looped and etched his cambers in your heart’s deep secrets—a teacher. During this pandemic, for its US publication, I’ve had to reread the novel I sent to Jack from Manila years ago in that time of rebellion so mirage-like that the dictator’s son is returning to power. So much for justice, essay

© 2022 Gina Apostol 163 our revolt’s chimera. Bibliolepsy had eventually been published in 1997, a full decade after my time at Hopkins. It won my country’s National Book Award the year my husband committed suicide. To this day, no one knows why Arne died. He has kept his secret. In the trope of another Hopkins class we shared, John Irwin’s legendary course Poe and Borges, Arne’s death is a locked-room puzzle. So is my grief. There is no entry into his suicide’s mystery. Worse, there is no exit. There is nothing as unlike his vibrant life as his leaving it. I kept Bibliolepsy in a drawer. It’s a book of joy—written in the buoyancy and span of my marriage—and was no match for my mourning. I could not write again for years. Arne’s own book, leo@ fergusrules.com, was accepted by the now-defunct Leapfrog Press two weeks after he died, and I spent the first years of my mourning editing it to ensure its posthumous release. Jack wrote its blurb, of course: one more form of condolence. Generosity. Arne’s first novel is a very good book: an ingenious foretelling of our current Internet hell when its dangers were only nascent, structured around Dante’s Inferno and starring a Filipino-American-Italian child who looked suspiciously like his daughter, except she was at an age he ended up never knowing. But it’s this first novel Bibliolepsy that’s leaned on miracles. In some surreal dream of second chances, it is out in the US a good quarter-century after I’d first published it—36 years after I had mailed it from Buendia. Thirty-six is the span of Arne’s short life. But I read it now also as a tribute to the ambition we shared as young writers at Hopkins. Rereading it, I recognize my swagger—the swagger I had as a young girl amid the rubble of rebellion sending my book off to the magician. I hear in it the swagger we 10 of us summoned to gather our nerve to be in Jack’s presence. My writing is tied to the freedom of invention I found in Jack’s books. But among readers held in thrall by Jack’s inventions, I know I am lucky to have had the privilege also of being read by Jack. Whenever I sent them, he read my books. I have his notes about them. They tell me, Brava. I have kept in the mind his praise for art, bravo, for art’s bravado, maybe even its bravery, his precise squiggle in the margins that told me, May your muse still be singing: his magic, summoning word. Grist for my mill. It held me to a vow of writing even when I believed I could not. To this day, his is the review that has always mattered. essay The Hopkins Review Volume 15, Issue 02, Spring 2022

t was easy to get lost. Gilman Hall, in those days anyhow, was an endless maze. If you weren’t careful, you could keep walking its circular corridors forever. There were times I was convinced if I ran that maze fast enough that I could catch a glimpse of my younger self, disappearing around the corner in the hallway just ahead. That wasn’t the only way of getting lost in Gilman, of course. In September of 1985, another fiction writer, one Jean Lenihan, and I sat in the coffee shop, which was then located in the building’s ornate reading room, a space with a checkerboard floor and a pair of stone-cold fireplaces. Jean and I were looking at our stories from workshop. Our professor, John Barth, had marked them up with his unique penmanship.

“What’s this word?” Jean asked me, showing me her story. “Is it—metallurgy?” I said, squinting. “Metallurgy?” said Jean, thinking it over. “He says he likes the metallurgy of my—is it intestines?”

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It was not impossible that John Barth admired the metallurgy of Jean’s intestines. He had a thing for turning a phrase. We were Boylan and Lenihan, two Irish writers. Why yes, we had started falling in love with each other before the semester even started, thanks for asking! On the first day of classes, Jean had driven us down to the Inner Harbor, where we watched the sharks swim around to new age music at the National Aquarium. Later we wandered around a shortlived amusement park in an old factory called The Power Plant. Jean and I, hopelessly smitten with each other, played Whac-A-Mole, a game that helped us perfect a skill that—little did we know—would prove invaluable in the years to come. There’s a lot more Whac-A-Mole in the life of a writer than I could ever have imagined. Eventually, Jean looked at her watch and said, “Isn’t our first workshop starting in, like, ten minutes?” It was. We slid down the Batpoles, jumped into her car, and screamed up Charles Street. The only parking spot on campus was the one marked reserved for the president. Jean Lenihan pulled right in. Then we had to find the classroom, somewhere in the labyrinths of Gilman Hall. It wasn’t easy.

On with the Story!, Jennifer Finney Boylan

Jennifer Finney Boylan

On with the Story!

We Everyweren’t.week, Jack greeted us with his remarkable mix of kindness and erudition. He encouraged us to transcend the mere mastered algebra of our craft with the innate fire of our talent so that our scribblings would ascend from the table into the heaven of finished art. And like that. On another occasion, he described plot as the incremental perturbation of an unstable homeostatic system and its catastrophic restoration to a new and complexified equilibrium.

Rosemary Mahoney walked through the room. We were a little afraid essay Hopkins

“I don’t think it’s intestines,” I said to Jean. She squinted. “He’s dotted an i,” she observed. “So I’m pretty sure it’s intestines.”“Howcan it be intestines?” I asked her. “Your intestines don’t have metallurgy!”

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“I don’t even know what metallurgy is!” she shouted. “It’s a kind of science!” I shouted back.

John Barth—whom we were told to call “Jack”—looked at us as we entered, then at the clock, then at us again. “Ah,” he said, in a loving voice that also suggested don’t be late again.

Which it is. Above all, Jack encouraged us to take ourselves seriously: as writers, as critics, as citizens of the literary world. He had such a big round head, as if his dome itself had swollen to contain that incredible brain. We were all a little intimidated by that brain, but then, how could we not be? There were so many of us—fledgling writers, playwrights, poets, trying to find our way. But there could only, ever, be one of him. He poured as much into criticizing our work as we had in creating it—more, in some cases. I still have those stories, carefully preserved, and I’ve convinced myself they will be “worth something” someday. Not because of the evidence they present of my own nascent oeuvre, but because those pages bear the handwriting of one of the 20th century’s most important and influential authors. There was, of course, only one problem. That handwriting could not be read.

“What does that have to do with anything!” she yelled. I paused. We were having our first fight.

On with the Story!, Jennifer Finney Boylan of her, too. In years to come, Rosemary would publish a half dozen books, including Whoredom in Kimmage: Irish Women Coming of Age. During our year she was the Writing Seminars’ postgraduate fellow, a position that the Seminarians called the “Super TA.” I was kind of in love with her too.

“Rosemary, can you read this?” She paused in her stride, came over to where we were sitting. She looked at Jean’s story. “Invention,” she said, a little impatiently, like, Of course it’s “invention.” What else could it be?

To be fair, Rosemary had been reading Jack’s handwriting for a year longer than “Metallurgyus. of her—invention?” I said. “Where does it say metallurgy,” said Rosemary, in a voice like, Have you taken total leave of your senses? “Show me.” “Right there,” I said, pointing to the word. Rosemary sighed, gently. “Felicity,” she said. “I knew that,” said Jean. Rosemary sighed again, and then headed into the corridors of Gilman Hall, where—somewhere—she had an office down a hallway through a wall behind some stacks behind a wall behind some stacks. We watched her “Hedisappear.sayshe likes . . .” Jean said, thoughtfully. “The felicity of my invention?”“That’swhat it says.” We considered this. “What does that mean?” Jean asked. “He means,” I said to Jean. “He thinks you’re awesome.” Which she was. A year later, I would find myself in the office that Rosemary Mahoney had occupied before me, as I landed the job of Super TA and embarked upon a postgraduate year of my own. I taught a course in postmodernism at the Writing Seminars, and—incredibly—became Jack Barth’s colleague. He let me know, in our frequent meetings on campus, that we were equals now, at least in his eyes. I remember describing a novel by Seminars alumna Kathryn Kramer (A Handbook for Visitors from Outer Space) as being “just like my own work, except a whole lot better.” Jack stopped me mid-sentence essay

and told me I should never put my own work down like that, that you begin to make your work matter by treating your own inventions with love. Then he encouraged me with his traditional mantra: “On with the story!”

After the talk, I got in a cab and traveled up Charles Street to the Homewood campus. It had changed so much! But then, I should talk. I walked up the stairs and into the grand foyer of Gilman Hall, taking care—as Hopkins students always do—not to step on the University seal on the floor. Jack, of course, had been a student here, too, back in the early 1950s. For a moment I stood there, trying to imagine young Jack stepping around the seal. Was there a time when he too wondered what his future held, and whether he would live long enough to write the stories that his brain might conjure?

The story went on. I eventually left Hopkins, got a job teaching at Colby College in Maine, and after 25 years there, became the writer in residence at Barnard, in New York City. I published some of the stories I’d been working on at Hopkins, and then a couple novels, and then a couple memoirs, then another novel. In my classrooms I was never far from Jack Barth, whose erudition and kindness I tried to model for my own students, some of whom have themselves gone on to become writers, and teachers. A few years ago, I wrote an essay entitled “The Catastrophic Restoration,” about Jack, and me, and the writers I’ve worked with. I called them Jack’s grand-students, and he their grand-teacher.

I headed down the stairs into the basement, to poke my nose into the classrooms of the Writing Seminars. Since my time at Hopkins, Gilman Hall had finally been renovated, and I feared, between the disorienting redo and the still-endless corridors of the place, that I might well get, you know: lost in the funhouse. But look, there: disappearing down the hallway ahead—there’s my younger self, wondering how on earth I am ever going to rise to the occasion of my own impossible life, wondering whether I have the courage to tell the stories that I need to tell, wondering whether the essay

Finally, 34 years after I first played Whac-A-Mole with Jean Lenihan, I gave a speech at a convention of independent booksellers down in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. This was in January of 2020, just about six weeks before Covid stopped the world cold. But I didn’t know that then.

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, Jennifer Finney Boylan essay

On with the Story!

trials that will be demanded of me in the years to come are ones that I will have a chance in hell of surviving.

But I didn’t get lost. Thanks to John Barth, I found my way.

I figured it out: I would attend Johns Hopkins as an English or Writing Seminars major, and study under John Barth himself. I enrolled at Hopkins.

R. L. Friedman Jack but Not John Barth I

Jack but Not John Barth, R. L. Friedman 169essay

’ve never met John Barth. Jack Barth I know, but John Barth remains a stranger.In1976, two of my high school English teachers invited me to join them at Emory University for a reading by famed novelist, John Barth. My love of literature was fiery at age 17, which inspired their thoughtful invitation. Barth was a renowned author and even a cult figure, winner of the National Book Award in 1973 for Chimera. One of the teachers suggested I read that work before the Emory event. I tried. I tried again. But the allusions to Dunyazad, Perseus, and Bellerophon were so far beyond my base of knowledge, I was intimidated long before we stepped out of the car on the Emory campus.

The auditorium was standing room only. Barth was famous at a time, I suspect, when students cared to tackle complex literary works and try to out-read one another (a phenomenon rendered with wry observance in a passage from The Floating Opera). For literate college students, knowing the intricacies of The Sot-Weed Factor or Giles Goat-Boy was essential. Gaps in one’s ultra-literacy mattered. Before the program began, students chatted fervidly about Barth’s works: the allusions behind New Tammany College, the picaresque bawdiness of Ebenezer Cooke’s adventures, and Ambrose, the sperm who narrates his passage towards the creation of a life. Several commented that Barth helmed the Writing Seminars department at his alma mater, Johns Hopkins. When he was introduced and began reading excerpts from Chimera, I marveled at his attributes: ultra-tall and beyond slender, his bald pate seemed to house a supercomputer. His tone was playful, less like an academic and more akin to a jazz artist riffing on exciting themes. The erudite wordplay enthralled the audience but zoomed so far over my head it cracked the ceiling—all of which inspired me to jump into the author’s works, absorbing them in chronological order. And since the first novel, The Floating Opera, concerned the adventures and existential musings of a Johns Hopkins alumnus, this tidbit added to a growing roster of feedback pointing me towards Baltimore.

I revered John Barth, the great artist. But I never met him.

Then came my first Writing Seminars class. I don’t recall my submission or why the grad student teacher held it in such low regard, but the force of her criticism wounded me far out of proportion to her intents.

Hypersensitive, I couldn’t take it. Never again did I take a Writing Sems class outside of playwriting (which was taught by a delightful chemistry professor with a love of theater and no expectations for artistry). Barth was quite a presence on campus. Whenever he strolled by, students whispered in awe. Whenever he held readings, the venues rocked with undergraduates, grad students, teachers, and the wider community. One of my favorite college memories occurred when the novelist and essayist John Gardner came to Hopkins to read from his works. The packed audience in Shriver Hall had come to witness an intellectual scrum. Supporters of Gardner adhered to his belief in literature as a necessary moral force. Supporters of Barth decried any boundaries imposed on literary efforts, preferring the self-referential play of metafiction—of stories acknowledging themselves as fictional forms. What I didn’t know was, regardless of their differences, Barth and Gardner were friends with mutual respect for the other’s output. Gardner read from his work, then opened the floor for questions. And who should raise his hand first but Barth, who challenged Gardner’s conceptions. Gardner smiled, knowing he was behind enemy lines, and quietly outlined his disregard for metafiction. Barth queried further. Gardner reiterated his views, citing examples of what he deemed moral literature versus experimental works. The audience understood that the answer to this dispute lay in their own hands: read what grabs, moves, and entertains you. Which made the give and take between these two giants seem like its own metafiction: we were observers but also participants.

Time went on (the nerve of time to do this). Thirty-plus years after my graduation, I received a call from my Hopkins advisor and longtime friend, Richard Macksey. John Barth had a business quandary, and given my work experience, could I help? This launched enjoyable rounds of emails between me and the man who signed off as “Jack.” I offered advice. Hopefully it helped. And months later, when a personal situation arose in my life, I felt comfortable enough to reach out to Jack and his wife Shelly for their views.

© 2022 R. L. Friedman 171 The Hopkins Review Volume 15, Issue 02, Spring 2022 Their feedback was thoughtful and much appreciated. In 2014, Johns Hopkins University acquired the collected papers of John Barth, and feted him at the Peabody Conservatory’s library. As eager to attend as a 17-year-old in high school, I listened to Barth’s meaningful reflections on literature and the passage of time. Then I introduced myself to Shelly, who led me by the arm to her husband, and said, “Jack, this is the actual Rob Friedman.” He beamed, shook my hand warmly, and we enjoyed a happy chat, both of us rueing how little time we had to really talk amid the flurry of spectators wanting to greet—and thank—one of the most brilliant literary minds of our time. The three of us have kept in touch. Their emails are warm and exuberant.Inlate 2021, I spotted a new publication on Amazon: an illustrated and annotated edition of the Arabian Nights. Immediately I knew what holiday gift to send to Jack and Shelly. Here is Jack’s response: “I intend to read it one page per night for the next 733 nights, saying muchas gracias at the bottom of each page. Cheers x733p! Bravissimo! Jack.” Forty-five years after listening to his startling variations on myth, what a pleasure it was to gift Jack and Shelly the tome that sparked his brilliance in Chimera. May they enjoy that work for 733 nights and many, many more. essay

in his roomy office in Gilman Hall; the large railroad station clock on the wall behind him haloed his big bald head, a diadem of Helvetica“Whatnumerals.youhave written here is not a story,” he told me. “I know that, Jack,” I said. John Barth was referring to a “story” I had turned in to the seminar called “Fort Wayne is Seventh on Hitler’s List.” The comment that my “story” wasn’t a story wasn’t dismissive or negative but descriptive. My “story” wasn’t, technically, a “story” but more an anecdote, he said, a complicated anecdote. It did not adhere to the narrative map of Freytag’s triangle: ground situation, vehicle, rising action, climax, and denouement. My “story” was technically an anecdote made up of anecdotes. A collage of fragments. It was made up of numbered sections, fragments or vignettes that Robert Coover, Jack informed me, labeled “crots,” an informal French term taken from typography meaning “turd.” Type compositors would look at the shapes black print made on the white proof page. The crot, the pattern of shit on a road. “But that’s okay,” Jack continued. “We’ll call this something else,” he said. A dramatic pause. “We’ll call it a ‘fiction.’”

* * *

EricGenesNelson, a graduate student in public health who lived in my building on North Charles, asked me if I wanted to splice some genes. In 1979, Dr. Bernice H. Cohen established at Johns Hopkins the nation’s first graduate program in genetic epidemiology. At the same time I was at Hopkins in the Writing Seminars creating new fictions, the labs were creating new life. I answered Eric, “Let’s go.” I had heard about gene splicing before when I was, a few years earlier, at Indiana University. The enzymatic scissors to cut and paste chromosomes essay

Gunkholing: An Anecdotary, Michael Martone

Michael Martone

Gunkholing: An Anecdotary Weanecdotesweresitting

* * * Boston or Baltimore

“That’s what I am calling E. coli nelsonenthis,” he said. It wasn’t viable for long, he told me, cleaning up. “But,” he said as he turned off the lights, “I am getting better at it each time I do it.”

173 had been around since the ’60s. But there was now a debate about the safety of the labs and preventing the escape of novel genetic material into the wild. Indiana had wanted to upgrade its facilities to a P3 level. At Hopkins in 1979, they too were using strains of E. coli, but the labs then seemed open to me. We walked in after hours. I remember the fluorescent lights humming and the fans running. Eric sat at a bench. He had put on a white lab coat. I was wearing a wool overcoat I had gotten in an Indianapolis thrift store. The best thrift store clothes always came from estates, not stuff donated when someone was alive. I was messing around in a genetics lab wearing a dead man’s coat.

In 1978, there were only a handful of mfa graduate schools. Boston University and Johns Hopkins weren’t even mfa programs. They gave out MAs in creative writing. I applied to nine or 10 programs. I got into Hopkins, and George Starbuck called me from Boston with an offer. I was a bit overwhelmed. I’d never been out of Indiana, really, and I told him that. “You don’t want to go to Hopkins,” he said. “Baltimore is the world’s largest small town.” I thought about that. And I thought a big small town sounded right for me.

Review Volume 15, Issue 02, Spring 2022

Sixteen years later, I was now a professor teaching, and I was moving south to teach at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. A week before I essay Hopkins

The

Eric said that he was shooting frog genes into E. coli. He let me have a look at a colony of cells under the microscope. I had no idea of what I was looking at or for.

“Tell Jack Barth to give you a ride on his yacht when you get there,” he told me. I told Jack what he had said about the yacht ride and that I was on my way to “HardlyBaltimore.ayacht,a 31-foot cutter christened ‘Cobweb,’” he said. “Maybe one day I’ll take you out on the Bay.”

situation from a parable: Once there was a man who had two sons. . . . That is all one needs. The potential for conflict is there— conflict between siblings, conflict between fathers and sons. One day (the one day is always a coincidence) the younger son comes to his father and says, “Father give all that is owed to me as I want to make my way in the world. . . .” I could never pull that keystone block out of the Jenga tower. Instead, I would continue to add to the masonry, buttress the scaffolding, repoint, shore up. I never could get on to the getting on with it, the rising action. Jack describes the rising action as “the incremental perturbation.” The machinery stalled for me. Not plot but blot. * * * Down the Ocean

* *

IOncewas always good at creating The Once Upon a Time, Jack always said— the ground situation, the setting of a story that constructs a cantilevered bridge of interesting details in anticipation of the incident, the “one day” that sets the whole “rising action” into motion. I was good at going on and on in the setting things up to happen and not very good at making that happen

Gunkholing: An Anecdotary, Michael Martone arrived, George Starbuck, who had retired in Tuscaloosa, died in that small, small town I was now moving to. *

The Eastern Shore looked like the Midwest to me. We drove on flat straight roads bordered by curtains of tasseled corn. It was humid the way Indiana was humid, but then there’s the ocean. In 1978, I saw the ocean, for real, for the first time. I was 24. We had arrived “down the ocean,” driving from Baltimore after dark to camp on essay

Here’shappen.aground

Assateague. I heard what I thought was a highway nearby but what turned out to be the Atlantic’s traffic of waves when I saw it for the first time in the dawn of the next day.

* * * One Day One day, I was sitting in my little office in Gilman Hall when Bill Baer, passing by, asked if I was going to mla

“What’s an mla?” I asked after him. I had no idea there were jobs to be had teaching creative writing and a venue where one interviewed with department hiring committees. The mla that year, it turned out, was in San Francisco. Jack would be there to do a reading. I couldn’t get into the reading as I wasn’t a member of the mla but saw him briefly in the lobby of the Hilton.

The Hopkins Review Volume 15, Issue 02, Spring 2022

I told him about the one interview I had with the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. I was lucky, I thought, to get such an interview. It was for a position in a graduate program. I didn’t think my MA was essay

I never liked the notion of “experimental” writing. I think I think of myself more as a “formalist” and picked up from Jack this geography of narrative structures. If I am categorized at all as a student of John Barth, I am associated with those “experimental” conventions and strategies of the self-conscious, the metafictional, the postmodern, I guess. I am also a trader in the “tricks” that John Gardner warned you about instead of the transparent texts Gardner promoted. All head. Little heart. But I am here to say that my Barthian anxiety of influence has to do not with the Literatures of Exhaustion nor even Replenishment but with the Literature of the Here, the Near. That is to say (and no one ever says it) that what I took from Jack were methods to negotiate the notion of Place, of Region. I am, thanks to Jack, a surveyor of turf, a staker of spots. I am an arranger, a collector of the whole philatelic catalogue of where Where is, a chip off the old block.

Gunkholing: An Anecdotary, Michael Martone a terminal degree, and I had only published one fiction, “Alfred Kinsey, Alone after an Interview, Dreams of Indiana,” in The Iowa Review. After my interview, I went back to my room in the cheap hotel. There I made a sandwich (I could afford a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter) and dreamt of Indiana. In the lobby of the Hilton, outside the ballroom where he would give his reading, Jack was interested in how things went. I told him that I thought it went. “I mostly talked about you, Jack,” I answered, answering the questions about how Jack was as a teacher, what kind of person Jack was, what was Jack working on now, etc. We were both amused. Jack enjoyed the “meta” quality of the anecdote and of the moment. Interviewing the interviewee about the interview. I said I didn’t think anything would come of it. And nothing did.

* * * Numbers: 1 The only time I remember Jack expressing surprise about anything I said or wrote happened in a one-on-one conference after one of my pieces had been discussed in the seminar. It took place in his big almost-empty office. A framed letter from his daughter. The title page of The Sot-Weed Factor. A picture of Shelly. The big clock on the wall behind him. I never saw him look at the clock. He seemed to conduct his conferences using the synchronicity of his own inner clock. At ten minutes till, he would finish up, having covered every possible thing that needed to be said, and ask for questions, having never glanced at the time. Hearing none from me, he would stand up and walk me to the door, reminding me of the next meeting and the prompts and tips previously discussed and ending with etc. etc., closing the door softly behind me outside. This particular time, he asked how my thesis was coming along. The Writing Seminars thesis was challenging then as it had to be finished in one year, but the one year was really nine months of the school year, and, really, essay

Jack never talked about what he was working on in class. At readings where he used parts of the work-in-progress as a script, he gave, in setting up, minimal hints about the book’s much larger structure.

the thesis had to be written in seven months as the final archival copy had to be professionally typed and perfectly rendered months before graduation.

With time running out, I sat there, ticking off my 10 fictions, the sun pouring in the big window of Gilman Hall, a surprising sliver in overlapping Venn diagrams, calibrating, always calibrating in that big brain.

Then, Jack taught three semesters and was off one semester. My year, he was on leave in the spring. He was just checking up on me as he was checking out, etc. etc.

essay The Hopkins Review Volume 15, Issue 02, Spring 2022

* * * Numbers: 7 The surprise? I told him my thesis was titled Numbers and went on to outline the contents of the book, 10 fictions each having a connection with one cardinal number, etc. But he did not register receiving any of that information. Instead, he was stuck—I could see the gears turning—struck on the news of the title, Numbers.

It was very strange to see this eminently controlled man, for a second, syncopate. Soon, he recovered, regained balance, nodded assent and encouragement, walked me out the door, assuring me that Charlie Newman would take good care of me next term.

It was much later, after Jack’s seventh book, letters, came out that I understood what had happened. Within letters—an epistolary novel, a sequel to all six of his previous books, rife with twinning and the number seven—one of its characters is writing a novel titled numbers.

My old friend, Mike Wilkerson, who died last year, was in Jack’s Writing Seminar, the year following mine, 1979–80. In February of ’80, he found out that Jack’s father, John “Whitey” Barth, had just died in Cambridge on the EasternMikeShore.hada car in Baltimore, an amc Gremlin, and we drove to the viewing. Mike and I had been classmates at Indiana University. We had driven that same Gremlin out East, years before, scouting graduate schools.

And then he related two humorous anecdotes about other funerals in which he had taken part. One had to do with a friend’s surreptitious burial at sea in the Chesapeake. The other about spreading another’s ashes only to discover that “ashes” is not le mot juste to describe cremains. After that, Jack thanked us again for coming out all this way to “view” his father, stowing the charm effortlessly, and returned funereally to the front of the room where he stood and greeted others next to the firefighters wearing whiteAsgloves.wecrossed the Bay Bridge in the Gremlin, Mike and I talked about the setting, the transformations of tone, manner, delivery we had just witnessed. And we talked about it again, years later, the last time we talked, a few weeks before he died.

essay

Two Anecdotes

Two volunteer firefighters in uniform and at attention flanked Whitey’s casket. The funeral home was packed. Whitey Barth had been a civicminded judge, the owner of a popular candy store (Whitey’s since 1922), and founder of volunteer fire brigades. Jack saw us in the back of the room, made his way through the crowd to greet us. He noted how strange it was, this “viewing,” and with an anthropological distance talked a bit about the doctrines and traditions of Methodism and his hometown.

Being from Indiana, I had never been in a kayak made for one or two or gone gunkholing before. I was in the front and Jack was doing all the work.

essay The Hopkins Review Volume 15, Issue 02, Spring 2022

AfterGunkholinglunch,Jack, said we should go out gunkholing in the two-man kayak.

Jack and Shelly lived then outside of Chestertown but spent most of the time cruising Chesapeake Bay. We had crab cakes and beaten biscuits for lunch. Once on the water, we went in and out of inlets and coves and mouths of creeks. I said that I heard there was more shoreline in the Bay than the entire coastline of the usa “Well, yes and no,” Jack said, “since the Bay’s shoreline would be part of the country’s coast, but I see what you mean.”

Notes on Contributors

183

ZACKARY SHOLEM BERGER is a poet, translator and short-story writer working in and among Yiddish, English, and Hebrew. His work has appeared in poetry, Words Without Borders, body, and elsewhere. His translation of the Yiddish prose poetry of Avrom Sutzkever was published in 2020. He is a primary care physician in Baltimore. KATE BERNHEIMER is author of the story collections How a Mother Weaned Her Girl from Fairy Tales and Horse, Flower, Bird, and editor of four anthologies including the World Fantasy Award-winning My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me. With Laird Hunt, she co-authored the novel Office at Night; with Andrew Bernheimer, she co-authored the design book Fairy Tale Architecture. AHIMSA TIMOTEO BODHRÁN is author of Archipiélagos; Antes y después del Bronx: Lenapehoking; and South Bronx Breathing Lessons. He is editor of the international queer Indigenous issue of Yellow Medicine Review: A Journal of Indigenous Literature, Art, and Thought; and co-editor of the Native issue of Movement Research Performance Journal.

JENNIFER FINNEY BOYLAN is the author of 18 books, including the forthcoming novel Mad Honey, co-authored with Jodi Picoult. She is the writer in residence at Barnard College of Columbia University. In 2022–23 she will be a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at

GINA APOSTOL lives in New York City and grew up in the Philippines. She has won the pen/Open Book Award and two Philippine National Book Awards. Her last novel, Insurrecto, was named one of Publishers Weekly’s Ten Best Books of 2018. Her fifth book, La Tercera, comes out in 2023.

JOHN BARTH is one of America’s most celebrated postmodernists. Winner of the 1973 National Book Award, Barth has received the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award, the PEN/Malamud Award, and the Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award. A native of Maryland’s Eastern Shore and a Johns Hopkins University alum, he taught in the Writing Seminars for 22 years.

R. L. FRIEDMAN has contributed multiple essays to The Hopkins Review A jhu graduate in humanistic studies (’81), he is about to enter Harvard Divinity School for a Master’s in Theological Studies. torrin a. greathouse is a transgender cripple-punk and mfa candidate at the University of Minnesota. Her work is published in poetry, Ploughshares, and The Kenyon Review. She is the author of Wound from the Mouth of a Wound (Milkweed Editions, 2020), winner of the 2022 Kate Tufts Discovery Award.Cultural

184 Harvard University. She lives in New York City and in Rome, Maine with her wife Deirdre.

RYAN CHOI is the author of In Dreams: The Very Short Works of Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, and of the forthcoming book “Three Demons”: A Study on Sanki Saito’s Haiku. His work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The Nation, The New Criterion, The New Republic, and elsewhere. He lives in Honolulu, Hawai’i, where he was born and raised.

OLIVER DE LA PAZ is the author of five collections of poetry and is a founding member of Kundiman. He teaches at the College of the Holy Cross and in the Low-Residency mfa Program at Pacific Lutheran University.

SAFIA ELHILLO is Sudanese by way of Washington, DC. She is the author of The January Children, Girls That Never Die, and the novel in verse Home Is Not a Country. With Fatimah Asghar, she is co-editor of the anthology Halal If You Hear Me

JALEN EUTSEY is a poet and freelance writer from Miami, Florida. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, Nashville Review, storySouth, Harpur Palate, and elsewhere. He received an mfa in Poetry from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.

critic/short-story scribe MICHAEL A. GONZALES has written for

JALYNN HARRIS (she/they) is a writer, educator, and book designer from Baltimore. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in Little Patuxent Review, Feminist Studies, poets.org, The Best American Poetry 2022, and HELENelsewhere.HOFLING is a Baltimore-based writer, editor, and artist. She is the winner of Arts & Letters’ 2021 Unclassifiable Contest, and her chapbook green light stories is forthcoming from dancing girl press. Her work can also be found in Berkeley Poetry Review, Electric Literature, Epiphany, Peripheries, Prelude, and elsewhere. kim ok (1896–unknown) was a modernist poet and translator, born in Jeongju, North P’yŏng’an (present-day North Korea). Kidnapped by agents of the Kim (Il-Sung) regime during the Korean War, he was last recorded living in 1958 at a farm collective in North Korea.

The Paris Review, The Village Voice, and Vibe. His fiction has appeared in The Oxford American, Under the Thumb edited by S. A. Cosby, TaintTaintTaint, and Killens Review of Arts & Letters

185

EILEEN G’SELL is a poet and critic with contributions to Current Affairs, LARB, Hyperallergic, diagram, Boston Review, and other outlets. Her first volume of poetry, Life After Rugby, was published in 2018; in 2019 she was nominated for the national Rabkin Foundation award in arts journalism. She teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.

ANANDA LIMA is the author of Mother/land (Black Lawrence Press, 2021, winner of the Hudson Prize), and four chapbooks. Her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Kenyon Review Online, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. She has an MA (Linguistics, ucla), and an mfa (Creative Writing, MICHAELRutgers-Newark).MARTONE’snew book is Plain Air: Sketches from Winesburg, Indiana, published by Baobab Press. The Complete Writings of Art Smith, The

Z. L. NICKELS ’s writing has previously appeared with Colorado Review, spin, Crazyhorse, and The Massachusetts Review, among others. He is currently an mfa candidate at the University of Massachusetts Amherst while working on his first novel about the death of the Great God Pan.

TERRI NOWAK received an mfa from the Mountainview Grand program of Southern New Hampshire University. Her debut short story was published in Narrative Magazine. A native of northern Minnesota, she lives a stone’s throw from the great Lake Superior with her husband.

NEUGEBAUER is an instructor at Johns Hopkins University. She is also a senior editor for The Painted Bride Quarterly and a coproducer for the podcast Slush Pile. Her work can be found in The Offing, Ploughshares, Columbia Journal, and Singapore Unbound, among others.

Bird Boy of Fort Wayne was published in 2020. He lives in Tuscaloosa with the poet Theresa Pappas. They met when students together in the Writing SAMANTHASeminars.

D. A. POWELL ’s most recent collection is Atlas T (Rescue Press, 2020). He teaches at University of San Francisco.

C. T. SALAZAR is a Latinx poet and librarian from Mississippi. He’s the author of Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking, out now from Acre Books, and three previous chapbooks. His poems have most recently appeared in West Branch, Gulf Coast, Denver Quarterly, Southeast Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Pleiades, and elsewhere.

JAMES SCALES is a writer and visual artist whose work has appeared or is forthcoming with Fives, Full Stop, Kenyon Review, The Spectacle, and others. He lives, works, and keeps bees in New York’s oldest house.

186

C. DIANE SCHARPER , a graduate of the Writing Seminars, has reviewed more than 500 books for national publications including The Wall Street

is an American poet in Greece. Her most recent collection, Like, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. This Afterlife: Selected Poems is forthcoming from fsg.

Yiddish poet Avrom Sutzkever (1913–2010), born in Lithuania, was a key figure in Vilnius’s Yiddish modernism. He was a partisan fighter during the war, rescued cultural treasures, and founded an epochal literary journal, Di Goldene Keyt, after emigration to Israel in 1947. His work spans lyric, epic, and prose LAYHANNARAforms.TEP was born and raised in Long Beach, California. She is the daughter of Cambodian refugees, an experience that shapes her writing. She is currently pursuing her Master’s in Asian American Studies at ucla, where she is working on a collection of short stories about the Cambodian American diaspora. The iconic, California-based American painter and influential teacher, WAYNE THIEBAUD (1920–2021), is best known for images of vernacular foodstuffs, although his work was far more diverse. He has been exhibited internationally and is represented in the collections of most major museums across the United States. stephen towns was born in 1980 in Lincolnville, South Carolina and lives and works in Baltimore. He trained as a painter with a bfa in studio art from the University of South Carolina and has also developed a rigorous, self-

GABRIEL SPERA

Journal and The New York Times. She has written or edited seven books and teaches memoir and poetry for the Johns Hopkins University Osher Program.

187

’s first collection, The Standing Wave, was a National Poetry Series selection and also received the Literary Book Award in Poetry from pen usa-West. His second book, The Rigid Body, received the Richard Snyder publication prize. He has received fellowships from the nea and City of Los Angeles.A.E.STALLINGS

HEATHER H. YEUNG 楊希蒂 teaches in poetry and poetics at the University of Dundee. She is the author of Spatial Engagement with Poetry and On Literary Plasticity, and the archive of her poetic and artists book works is held in the Scottish Poetry Library.

188 taught quilting practice. In 2018, the Baltimore Museum of Art presented his first museum exhibition, Stephen Towns: Rumination and a Reckoning.

KAREN WILKIN is a New York-based curator and critic, recently co-curator of The Body in Question at the Painting Center, Chelsea. The author of monographs on Wayne Thiebaud, Anthony Caro, David Smith, Hans Hofmann, and Helen Frankenthaler, among others, she teaches at the New York Studio School.

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“Marvelously translated by Zackary Sholem Berger –every page persuades us that the angel of prose confided in Sutzkever as faithfully as the angel of poetry.” AVAILABLE NOW At bookstores shop.yiddishbookcenter.organd – Benjamin Balint, author of Kafka’s Last Trial

Published four times a year by Johns Hopkins University Press for the Writing Seminars of the Johns Hopkins University HopkinsReview.com Samantha Neugebauer Z. L. Nickels Terri Nowak D. A. Powell C. T. AvromA.JamesSalazarScalesC.DianeScharperGabriel SperaE.StallingsSutzkever1913–2010 Layhannara Tep Wayne Thiebaud 1920–2021 Stephen Towns Karen HeatherWilkinH. Yeung 楊希蒂 Gina Apostol John ZackaryBarthSholem Berger Kate AhimsaBernheimerTimoteo Bodhrán Jennifer Finney Boylan Ryan OliverChoidela Paz Safia Elhillo Jalen Eutsey R. L. EileenMichaelFriedmanA.Gonzalestorrina.greathouseG’SellJalynnHarrisHelenHoflingKimOk 1896–unknown Ananda MichaelLimaMartone