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Megan Marz | Longreads | October 24, 2023 | 4,164 words (15 minutes)

This spring, the literary critic Laura Miller got annoyed with Brandon Taylor’s new novel, The Late Americans. A fan of Taylor’s “brilliant” Substack and “irresistible patter” on Twitter, she found his book disappointingly lugubrious. “Brandon Taylor’s online writing is vibrant, funny, and true,” read the subhead of her review. “Why is his fiction trying so hard to be something else?” The Slate piece subjected the novel to some churlish complaints. But it was the inclusion of “online writing” that attracted minor controversy; writers and critics tweeted in response that to compare an author’s novel to his tweets was to insult the author and embarrass oneself. One respondent wrote, “this may be the worst piece of writing on a book or author I have ever read.” Another said, “it’s gauche to even mention a professional author’s twitter account in a review.”

People have been writing all kinds of things online for decades now. If you count Justin Hall’s links.net as the first blog—and many do, though Hall himself credits Ranjit Bhatnagar—the original form of popular writing on websites will turn 30 in January. Thirty years ago, I was a child; now I’m middle-aged. Writing on the internet remains young. Its literary milestones and genres are too short to ride the roller coaster of critical regard. Online literature is still usually self-published, doesn’t receive major writing prizes, and isn’t reviewed in newspapers or magazines.

The late Robert Silvers, a founding editor of The New York Review of Books, lamented this situation in 2013. “If a novel is published, we have a novel review,” he said in an interview with New York magazine. But the “millions and millions if not billions of words in tweets and blogs” were not getting the critical attention they deserved: 

[I]f one cares about language, if one cares about the sensibility in which language is expressed, and if one cares about the values that underlie our use of language . . . then these media, it would seem to me, should qualify as the subject of criticism. We seem at the edge of a vast, expanding ocean of words, an ocean growing without any critical perspective whatever being brought to bear on it. To me, as an editor, that seems an enormous absence.

Ten years later, that absence is 10 years wider. We have trend pieces about platforms used for writing; posts that aggregate other posts; news stories about things people say and do online; novels, poems, and memoirs that would not exist without having germinated on the internet. But the literary qualities of online writing remain mostly invisible to U.S. literary institutions—even as countless people read it—until the moment it becomes a book. 

And, of course, much of it never does. For 30 years, writers have been using blogs, social media, and email to do things with words that are difficult or impossible to do inside books. They have immersed us in stories still unfolding, created personas that interact with readers, woven their writing into inboxes and feeds, and used code to write at a distance. The public record of literature in the 21st century is full of gaping holes where these things should be. The missing material is right there on our screens, but it slides past with little formal acknowledgement. While it’s become banal to observe that online life is fully enmeshed with the rest of the world, an imaginary curtain separates online writing from the rest of U.S. literature. It’s time to take that curtain down. 

In the 1990s, the literary press became briefly excited about digital literature. Some writers were using Storyspace, a software program introduced in 1987, to compose hypertext. The ability to add links, even before the web, let them write high-concept, choose-your-own-adventure narratives. In one of the first and best known of these stories, the protagonist’s son lives or dies depending on the reader’s selections. Works like these debuted on floppy disk; you can now buy them on USB or find read-throughs on YouTube. More than the most postmodern novel could, they embodied the era’s values of fragmentation and nonlinearity. The New York Times Book Review ran a handful of articles to introduce the new concept: hypertext fiction. The most famous of these articles, published in 1992, was headlined “The End of Books.”

But books were never really threatened by hypertext fiction, which did not attract many writers, let alone readers. Self-styled “electronic literature” settled into an academic niche dominated by conceptual and technical experiments, while “an always-skeptical literary mainstream gleefully rejected the digital outright,” as the scholar Simone Murray wrote. Thanks to the Kindle and other e-readers, the book eventually became the primary unit of even fiction read digitally.

Nonfiction is another story, though—one that has not permeated the literary mainstream or the experimental “e-lit” margins, despite flowing all around both of them. The story is: around the time hypertext fiction was failing to find an audience, hypertext nonfiction was attracting thousands and then millions of people. “I’ll never forget the Monday morning in the mid-90s when I rushed in to work . . . and hurriedly pointed my browser to www.links.net to see if Justin Hall had broken up with his girlfriend over the weekend,” Rob Wittig, one of the few e-lit people to write much about Hall, remembered in 2003. 

Hall was a 19-year-old student at Swarthmore College when he started his site in 1994, soon naming it Justin’s Links from the Underground in homage to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, a book he hadn’t read. The word “blog” wouldn’t exist for another few years. At first, Hall collected links he’d found browsing the web, including links to sites about sex and drugs. In those days before search engine ubiquity, this was a popular service. But Hall was also a writer. “I just said, I have this medium, so why don’t I see what my stories look like there,” he said on a podcast in 2021. “And if people are coming for this utility of finding links that they want to traverse, well, maybe they’ll accidentally read a poem. And if they want to read a second poem, well, that’s on them.” 

Eventually Hall published thousands of pages of interlinked poems and stories, a yearslong diary cataloging his life’s events, people, and thinking in explicit detail for his thousands of readers. During the months he spent as an intern at Wired, his site often got more traffic than the magazine’s. A documentary filmed in 1996 described it as an On the Road for the ’90s. When he took a pause in 2005, the San Francisco Chronicle ran a front-page story, estimating that he’d amassed 4,800 pages and wondering if he’d come back. He did; his last post was in 2021.

Hall’s style is evident from what amounts to his About page: 

My mom, dad and step-father were/are lawyers, and very dedicated ones at that. Due to their work ethic, I was raised primarily by a series of nannies. When I was eight, my father, an alcoholic, killed himself; much of my early writing wrestles with this. 

It is funny, matter-of-factly intimate, and granularly self-documentary in a style that would soon spread everywhere. And while early hypertext fiction used links within closed systems, Hall used links to weave his writing into the outside world. He linked to other people’s sites in addition to his own writing on pretty much anything he mentioned. You could read his story in a straight line, but you didn’t have to. Hall is sometimes juvenile, his prose occasionally rough or purple, but that’s a fair price to pay for his co-inventing the 21st century’s most influential literary genre so far.

In November 2000, The New Yorker estimated there had been only 50 blogs on the internet as recently as spring 1999. After Blogger made it easy in summer 1999 to post without writing HTML, blogs proliferated exponentially. By 2007, when their growth started to taper, there were about 70 million. (Today, a commonly cited count is 600 million.) Like the authors of most books before them and most tweets after them, bloggers were largely uninterested in producing literature. They wrote to help themselves or others, to do journalism or scholarship, to evangelize, to get attention, to find community, to make money if they were lucky, and mostly to share their lives. But none of those motivations excludes the possibility of artmaking, and a few bloggers followed Hall in approaching their writing as art, at least implicitly.

Emily Gould was the one I read most frequently. She began posting at emilymagazine.com in 2005, when we were both just out of college. Like a lot of good blogs, hers was full of the improvisational energy that, before the internet, had been the aesthetic province of comedians and jazz musicians. Gould was documenting her life in real time—books she read, thoughts she had, food she ate, daily enthusiasms and frustrations—which meant she was writing it fast. But those of us who read it as it happened read it slowly. People like to say the internet speeds reading up, but a personal blog, read in real time, can slow a story’s pace down to the timescale of life; the thickest book in existence can be read in less calendar time. Not even the author knew when a blog would end, which is what made it feel so alive.

Gould’s eye for detail and sense of pacing contributed to this vitality. I remember learning that she was quitting her publishing job from a post in which she described the office cafeteria’s switch from “marmalade” to “orange jelly”—a semi-lighthearted complaint that doubled as an augury of corporate decline. Marmalade is real, and a beautiful word. One look at that dignified dactyl and you know you’re in for something good. Orange jelly sounds fake and embarrassing. When Gould said it was the reason she was leaving, you knew it was a joke, but there was also something to it. The actual reason was a gossip-blogging job at Gawker, which raised her profile enough that she was assigned a 2008 New York Times Magazine cover story about her life as a blogger. The story includes a moment when her boyfriend at the time demanded she take down something she’d posted about him. On the surface, the post seemed trivial. But his request “felt like being stifled in some essential way.”

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The same thing had happened to Hall. When a former girlfriend asked him to scrub her from his blog, he’d said, or so The New York Times Magazine reported in 2004, ”This is my art. I’ll remove specific things that bother you, but I can’t go through the entire Web site and remove every mention of your name.” When another girlfriend asked him not to blog about her, he agreed, but the inability to write freely led to an emotional breakdown, about which he posted a video. Gould and Hall felt deeply about what they were doing. They commanded large audiences and appeared in mainstream media, becoming national avatars for a new kind of writing. They also repeatedly referenced literary influences. But journalists categorized their efforts as sociocultural rather than aesthetic phenomena. This would happen again and again to writers who tried new things on the internet. Always a curiosity, sometimes a trend, never a work of art.

It was a practical matter, and a matter of tradition. Books are an excellent medium. Book publishers have always been a useful filter for a world in which the quantity of writing is always increasing. They still manage to publish great written art, thanks to fragile and fraying systems built by writers and editors. Doing so has given them a power around which the literary world revolves. Even the least commercial magazines do not tend to review work not currently being marketed by a publisher. And books—whether e-, audio, or print—are important to certain writers’ compensation. (Though few writers make much money publishing literature, and some writers who do make money are turning away from books.)

Then there are the inconvenient questions. While some online writers might welcome critical attention, for others it might be a nightmare with terrible consequences—broken relationships, lost jobs. How should a critic distinguish “published,” in the sense of technically visible, from “published” in the traditional sense of public? At what point in a work’s lifespan should it be written about? And what aesthetic criteria apply? Blogs are to novels as improv is to sketch or song lyrics are to poetry. They can reach and even surpass the standard set by their finer cousin, but they should not necessarily be held to it. 

A great time to answer these questions would have been when books began drawing heavily from the well of online aesthetics. Some of the most celebrated literature of the 2010s recounted daily life in granular detail; incorporated real conversations; was made of plotless fragments; or, even in fiction, used real people’s names. These books were copiously compared to one another under the banners of “autofiction” and “lyric essay.” Names like Sheila Heti, Karl Ove Knausgård, Tao Lin, Maggie Nelson, and Claudia Rankine were difficult to escape if you were the type of person who read book reviews. Critics correctly described their books as successors of everything from Saint Augustine’s Confessions to Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick. But I have yet to read a book review that acknowledges the influence of specific online work not written by the book’s own author. Blogs and social media are described en masse as a social phenomenon to which these authors responded, but rarely as a textual one to which they are indebted. 

The omission is particularly glaring given the number of literary writers whose books grew out of their own online work. While Gould’s novels are pointedly unbloggy, her short-lived e-book startup distributed several examples: Making Scenes (2001), whose author, Adrienne Eisen, claims it was the first “blog-to-book” ever; Meaty (2013), an essay collection inspired by Samantha Irby’s bitchesgottaeat.blogspot.com; and Prostitute Laundry (2015), collected from Charlotte Shane’s email newsletter about her love life and sex work. Blogs lost more in translation than a serialized novel from the 19th century: links, the comments of other people, a cadence determined by the author, a length that could always grow longer. In the words of Bhanu Kapil, whose blog “incubated” her book Ban en Banlieue (2015), “You know that putting Ban in this form is like wearing a three piece suit in the hot springs. I wish I had the courage to let the blog be my book instead.” 

That’s what the writer Megan Boyle was going to do. In 2013, she got the idea to liveblog her entire existence, “everything that I could think of on a relatively constant basis,” as she told an interviewer for The Creative Independent five years later. She began on March 17 and intended to do it forever. “That’s what began to excite me,” she said. “That I’d just do this for my whole life, and that would be the ‘art’ of it.” Timestamped passages moved back and forth between quotidian—”mail the goddamned packages”—and poetic:

4:43PM: louis called. interesting dynamic, these phone calls with louis. we sound slow and happy and surprised to hear each other’s voices. let him in. assembled table and chairs while he assembled bed. NPR was on and I felt sometimes … like i wanted to say ‘the opinions on this radio do not reflect the other person in this room.’

After five-and-a-half months, she stopped. In 2018, Tyrant Books published what she had written as a novel called Liveblog. Like any given blog, hers had been followed by real-time fans but not reviewed. The moment it became a book, however, critics suddenly were able to see and expound upon its literary qualities. It was positively reviewed in The New Yorker and Bookforum, and compared to other serious literature. But this valorization could only happen after the “art” of Boyle’s project—its ongoingness—had been stripped from it, compressed into an object that could be read in a few days or weeks.

In a rare expression of literary bullishness, the novelist Edmundo Paz Soldán had suggested at the blog’s apex in 2007 that it was “threatening to supplant the novel as the great genre in which everything can find its place.” But the blog ended up becoming one more thing that found its place in the novel, which has yet to be surpassed as a tool of literary legitimation.

Boyle was associated with “alt lit,” a group of writers in the late 2000s and 2010s who endeavored to “assimilate to literary art the mutant sensibility of a new mass medium,” as Frank Guan said of Tao Lin, the group’s figurehead. They were also some of the first, and remain some of the only, writers to position their online work as equal to books. The poet Mira Gonzalez copublished her Selected Tweets with Lin in 2015. She told The Creative Independent they had done so to show that “once you take Twitter out of the context of being reliant on this relatively new form of technology, there’s no difference between Twitter and any other kind of literature.” By Twitter, Gonzalez clarified, she meant the internet. Twitter was the stand-in closest at hand because by then, social media had overtaken blogs as the dominant form of online expression, and Twitter was popular with the verbally oriented.

While alt lit writers on Twitter mostly continued the bloggy tradition of documenting real-time experiences, other writers experimented with other genres. Patricia Lockwood did absurdist “sexts.” (“Sext: An iceberg whispers to you, ‘Just the tip.’”) Teju Cole did “small fates,” which compressed news stories into epigrammatic tweets full of ironic humor and social critique. (“In Kubwa a man armed with a toy gun stole a real Camry.”) Ranjit Bhatnagar, the blogger who inspired Justin Hall, created @pentametron, a bot that paired tweets written in iambic pentameter to create rhymed couplets. The couplets were sometimes absurd and sometimes surprisingly sensical. One random user’s “I’m kind of thirsty for a valentine” led into another’s “My volume doesn’t have a minus sign.” With recontextualization alone, they put everyday language in a higher register—suggesting, Shakespeare-style, that the line between poetry and daily speech is invisibly thin, a question of viewpoint. 

Poetry bots were one of Twitter’s most beautiful genres, bringing e-lit experimentation to the masses. But now most of them have stopped working. X, as Twitter is now known, announced earlier this year that it would restrict free access to its API, which bots need to function. The change was one of many points on the graph of X’s decline in users and cachet. But other longtime Twitter/X projects persist, like the internet-deranged persona @dril (“cops tazing wild hogs ultimate compilation”) and Melissa Broder’s serially sad girl persona @sosadtoday (“i’m alive in a dead way”). 

In a New Yorker review of Broder’s So Sad Today, a 2016 essay collection named after the Twitter account, Haley Mlotek wrote that the book’s shortcomings made her appreciate the account’s accomplishments: “It captures how so many of us communicate on social media, crafting a careful persona that hides and reveals.” And yet, even though @sosadtoday was the true literary innovation in the critic’s estimation, it was the book that occasioned a review. I’ve written literary criticism for many publications, and I rarely have trouble placing a book review I want to write. But of the dozen or so pitches I’ve sent about an online work, none have landed. And as a reader of popular literary criticism for two decades now, I’ve only ever come across a single full-length review of an online work in a nonacademic venue: Matt Pearce’s 2011 essay on Cole’s small fates for The New Inquiry. It’s a single example, one that Cole’s status as a newly acclaimed novelist probably helped make possible. But it proves that answering the questions online work raises for mainstream critics is doable, fruitful, and not all that complicated.

In 2013, Lockwood gave a lecture about Twitter at the University of Pennsylvania. Before ending with a reading of sexts, she said:

Innovative literature happens where people have room to play, and it happens where no one is watching. It happens among groups that initially aren’t taken seriously. . . . It happens in darkness. And after a while, people become aware of it. And after an even longer while, it’s called literature. That’s a good thing. That is the way of the world. Mushrooms and literature grow in the shade, but eventually must enter the cold light of day to be eaten by yuppies at $14 a pound.

Calling for tweets or blogs to get reviewed in The New Yorker or become eligible for a Pulitzer is in part to call for their yuppification, which would ruin the fun. Many of the works I’ve discussed play with, and draw aesthetic power from, their lack of professional legitimacy. Having an incentive to get reviewed or win a prize might motivate more people to start writing in certain ways, but it would also change the character of the writing. A @dril looking to get reviewed by The New Yorker would not be @dril, and so the world might be deprived of such classics as: “another day volunteering at the betsy ross museum. everyone keeps asking me if they can fuck the flag. buddy, they wont even let me fuck it.”

But metabolizing the literature of previous generations is necessary to create new literature. And writing on the internet has a way of disappearing, so that it may not be available long enough for enough people to become aware of it, let alone to call it literature. An API might become too expensive, a hosting fee might no longer seem worth it, an author might delete or lock their account after a platform empties out, as X—and social media in general—feels like it’s doing now. In 2017, the Library of Congress decided to stop archiving all public tweets and instead collect only those that are “thematic and event-based, including events such as elections, or themes of ongoing national interest, e.g. public policy.” The Wayback Machine is a good but gappy source of disappeared blogs, and it probably won’t do any better with email newsletters. 

Even if we had a perfect archive, it still wouldn’t tell the whole story. You could find a forgotten novel in a used bookstore and, with some imagination, recreate the experience of reading it around the time of its publication. But a lot of online writing has important temporal and contextual dimensions, and unless someone records the experience of reading at the time or in the context, those dimensions are lost. 

So let me tell you about some work that’s still living: there are new magazines, like the html review, which combine a traditional literary magazine format with a more computer-friendly ethos. Like Twitter bots did, they’re introducing more readers to literature written with both human and coding languages. And then, of course, there are email newsletters, which have been around for years but gathered more steam when Substack launched in 2017, giving writers a built-in way to collect payments. One Substack project that uses the form well is Samantha Irby’s “who’s on judge mathis today?” In more than 250 editions, she has twisted TV recaps into comic stories observed through a personal lens: “shearie says that one day she went over to rhian’s house and discovered a used condom.… rhian calls her ‘inspector gadget’ and i’m so sorry to side with a man but that really made me laugh! i loved that cartoon!!!!!!!!”

My favorite newsletter is Justin Wolfe’s thank you notes, which he started writing in 2015. Wolfe modeled his project on Joe Brainard’s I Remember, an experimental memoir published in 1970 in which every sentence begins with “I remember.” Wolfe chose “I’m thankful” as a refrain. “i’m thankful that even though i had built up going back to work as this horrible huge ominous thing, it’s actually been just fine and, as is almost always the case, the blurry projection i built out of anticipatory anxiety far exceeded reality,” he wrote early on, in a post I discovered in the archive and sometimes return to on Sundays. In well over a thousand editions ranging from hundreds of words to one (“pizza”), Wolfe has given a sharper angle to the practice of real-time life-writing. His constraint, even when broken, lends it more structure; his form, email, more tightly stitches the fabric of his days into the fabric of ours.

It’s still true, as the poet Mira Gonzalez said in her Creative Independent interview, that “there are people who are saying things like . . . ‘Writing on the internet doesn’t matter.’” But the internet is nevertheless, as she added, “the future of humor, of writing, of everything.” On our corporate-throttled web, this sounds like a frightening prospect. All we can do, in literature and in life, is try to make it otherwise.

Megan Marz is a writer in Chicago.

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Copyeditor: Krista Stevens
Fact-checker: Julie Schwietert Collazo

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Daisy Alioto | Longreads | February 2020 | 16 minutes (3,903 words)

“A house is the physical manifestation of the ego”

– Aline Kominsky-Crumb, “My Very Own Dream House”

I. Security

I have always harbored suspicions about fire escape windows. When my mother was living in Boston in the 80s, her TV set sat across from the window that opened onto her fire escape. One night she woke up to a hairy leg entering the window and screamed loudly enough to wake her neighbors and scare away the television thief. An acquaintance who lives in Park Slope listened to an intruder pop the glass out of her fire escape window and watched their iPhone light sweep closer to the bedroom as she silently tried to shake her boyfriend awake. After an eternity, he sprung up and chased the intruder out with a hockey stick.

My boyfriend does not harbor suspicions about fire escape windows, so when he moved to a one bedroom apartment, security considerations became my own research project. The acquaintance in Park Slope sent a link to a $20 window alarm on Amazon. I watched a short video about the installation process and began to read the reviews. The top review was 5/5 stars, written by Mary in Florida and it broke my heart more than any thief ever could.

She writes that she debated buying a door alarm but never did, despite the fact that the rest of the house was baby proofed for two children under two years old. One day, after feeding a bird outside, the younger one slipped back out without her noticing — probably to chase the bird, she says. In a few minutes she sensed the lack of noise in the house, the too quietness. She found him in the pond across the street and he died the next day.

The review continues. “I am a good mom,” she writes, listing the other ways she baby-proofed the home. “I am a good mom.” I’ve forgotten why I’ve come to Amazon. Maybe this is someone’s idea of a sick joke, a manufacturer’s enthusiastic review of their own product gone too far but no… with a little Googling, I find Mary and the local reporting on the tragedy.

I want to reach through my screen and hold Mary. To tell her yes, you are a good mom. It’s not your fault that doors open and babies look at birds. Of course you are a good mother, there’s just so much that can go wrong with a home.

According to Robert Lee’s A Treatise On Hysteria (1871), Greek physician Aretaeus was one of the first thinkers to link hysteria to the female body. “In the middle of the flanks of a woman lies the womb, a female viscus closely resembling an animal.” The womb wanders the body, leaving a slew of undesirable symptoms in its wake. “On the whole it is like an animal within an animal,” Aretaeus writes.

In 1951, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s iconic glass house — constructed an hour West of Chicago — filled modernist architecture patrons with awe. Nora Wendl, Associate Professor of Architecture at University of New Mexico, tells a different story. Dr Edith Farnsworth, the woman for whom the home was built, was deeply unsettled by its transparency. “The truth is that in this house with its four walls of glass I feel like a prowling animal, always on the alert. I am always restless. Even in the evening. I feel like a sentinel on guard day and night. I can rarely stretch out and relax,” Farnsworth told House Beautiful. However, rather than accept her critique as fact, an instance of a male architect flying too close to the sun by sacrificing function for form, Farnsworth was dismissed as Mies van der Rohe’s allegedly jilted lover. A hysteric.

“All successive histories of the Farnsworth House elect to focus not on the potential flaws of the Farnsworth House that Farnsworth outlines — or the potential flaws of the power imbalance of architect-client relations — but rather on the original, baseless story that Farnsworth was heartbroken and vengeful when approaching the press,” Wendl writes.

Farnsworth’s self-description as a wandering animal, trapped in the glass house like Aretaeus’s zoomorphic womb, is all too appropriate given her gendered dismissal. In truth, the house did heat up in the sun like a greenhouse. Water leaked through its clear ceiling. Over the past 60 years, the site has struggled with flooding. Given the state of the climate, this struggle is likely to continue. The narrative of the Farnsworth house is of a woman, rather than an architect, coming up against their limitations. The wandering womb can never come home.

Ludwig II of Bavaria, born in 1845, was nicknamed the “Mad King” for his lavish spending on architectural marvels. In 1869, he began building the Linderhof Palace in Bavaria, alongside the dense and largely uninhabited Ettaler Forst. On the grounds of the palace, a cartoonish pile of rocks opens to reveal an artificial cave, the Venus Grotto. Inspired by the first act of Wagner’s opera Tannhäuser, Ludwig II’s grotto portrays the Venusberg, a fairyland belonging to the goddess-seductress.

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The plaster shell of the space is as pearly as the instep of Fragonard’s swinging woman. The king installed electric dynamos to light the pool with a succession of colors. Ludwig II cited the Blue Grotto in Capri, where a natural effect of sunlight helps to illuminate the sea cavity from below in rich lapis blue. However, the rococo Venus Grotto is not only blue. It is at times pink as a baby’s fingernail and mossy as oxidized copper.

The grotto is a victim of water from all sides. Ground water permeates its walls, while the humidity of the lake compromises the fake stalactites above. As such, it’s been undergoing repairs since at least 2015, not projected to be completed until 2024.

II. Vision

“I’m just an animal looking for a home.”

– The Talking Heads, “This Must Be The Place”

The first recorded book of architectural theory, On Architecture, dates back to antiquity and comprises a ten part treatise by Marcus Vitruvius Pollio. Vitruvius is famous for articulating a triad of core qualities that each building must have: firmitas, utilitas, venustas. This translates to strength, functionality and beauty (aesthetics). Architects have embraced this trinity with religious fervor. Structures adhering to this triad represent the best in architecture.

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A home represents the idea we’ll no longer wander; we don’t talk about the ways we wander within the home. In Farnsworth, public opinion diagnosed the woman and not the architecture. In Ludwig, the grotto was a proxy for both. However, women and closeted kings aren’t the only people to fall short of the myths of home. James Joyce’s Ulysses transposes the hero’s journey onto two groups with a fraught relationship to their homelands: the Jews and the Irish. In the chapter Ithaca, Leopold Bloom returns home only to realize he’s forgotten his keys. He must decide whether “To enter or not to enter. To knock or not to knock.” Eventually, he scales the wall to his garden. “Did he fall?” Joyce asks. Yes, with his full body weight, we learn.

By 1886, a group of frustrated advisors vowed to depose Ludwig. Historians speculate the coup had more to do with Ludwig’s homosexual desires and various eccentricities than his wreckless spending, which primarily affected the royal rather than state coffers. Nonetheless, he was found mentally unfit to rule by a psychiatrist named Dr. Gudden who had only met the patient once (twelve years prior). “He is teetering like a blind man without guidance on the verge of a precipice,” Dr. Gudden wrote. If he was a woman, he would have been branded a hysteric. Instead, his crime was to have acted like one.

Three days after Ludwig was officially removed from power, doctor and patient went walking together in the late morning. When they didn’t return, they were both found dead in the shallows of Lake Starnberg. Ludwig’s death was ruled suicide by drowning, although this explanation is far from universally accepted: an autopsy found no water in his lungs.

Was Ludwig attempting an escape by boat, swapping the floating scallop of his grotto for something more practical? His watch had stopped at 6:54pm. Did the setting sun shine through from beneath and illuminate him?

***

Ant Farm was a San Francisco design and architecture practice known for their pop culture performances. In 1971, they developed a national reputation for their Inflatocookbook, styled like The Anarchist Cookbook, but for inflatable architecture rather than bombs. This of course drew comparisons to radical contemporaries, such as the Youth International Party (Yippies) led by Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. In 1967, the Yippies famously attempted to levitate the Pentagon.

In 1974, Stanley Marsh 3 invited Ant Farm to Amarillo, Texas to assemble Cadillac Ranch– a field of cars tipped forward and buried up to their windshields. The overall effect is Stonehenge meets a John Chamberlain sculpture.

Marsh was the third in a line of Stanley’s propelled to arts patronage by their oil money. However, he preferred the ‘3’ to a Roman numeral, as a reflection of his humility. He lived in a house called Toad Hall, probably named for Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows or A. A. Milne’s stage adaptation Toad of Toad Hall. Toad’s house is described as a “Jacobean residence with bits of Tudor. Finest house on the river.” What separates Toad from Leopold Bloom? When we write animals, we give them homes. Architecture, which is meant to suppress our animal nature, instead reveals it.

The animal within the animal.

***

When I was 10 years old I played a game called “Arctic Tundra,” which consisted of building a shelter from my portable fan while on its highest setting. My materials were whatever was in bed at the time, except for my sheets or blankets. I loved the thrill of shivering behind a wall of limp pillows and irregular stuffed animals. The whole point was to build an imperfect buttress for my own discomfort.

I taught “Arctic Tundra” to my little sister. In those days, I wasn’t imparting the best example. I also told her tales about a rabid dog named Cassidy that lived in my dad’s new neighborhood. I told her that an old tomato we saw on a walk was a human heart. There was an unfriendly dog named Cassidy, but she lived in my mom’s neighborhood. This bit of mirroring was lost on both of us.

While I acted out environmental extremes, there was another trajectory of home happening in the background. My parents divorced just before my 10th birthday, and my father moved from a hotel room to a rental house to an apartment to another apartment to a tent in my aunt’s backyard. An extension cord snaked across the deck, connecting his TV set to the house like an umbilical cord. The myth of Cassidy belonged to the rental house where other imagined menaces swirled. One day while out for a walk, perhaps the same walk when we saw the tomato, the mailman stopped to ask my dad where we were living. He thought it was interesting timing for the family he was renting from to have moved out. My dad was polite, but as the mailman drove away he grimaced. The family was Saudi Arabian. It wasn’t long after 9/11. Did we understand what the mailman was insinuating? Did we understand that he was wrong?

I wonder if that mailman has ever experienced true domestic failure — foreign attack being the only type he was primed to expect.

***

I can’t stop thinking about Mary. She volunteers her story in the reviews section of Amazon, and yet she anticipates the criticism that comes with telling her story. She is afraid of being seen as a “bad mom.” In Mark Greif’s n+1 essay “Octomom, One Year Later,” he describes Octomom (Nadya Suleman) in the press as a “tentacular comic book monster, slithering her baby-oiled limbs into the American moneypot.” We are supposed to resent Suleman for being a burden on her fellow countrymen. Her body is like the feminine grotto Ludwig II’s advisors so despised.

After the 1970s, Jerry Rubin turned his back on the radical lifestyle. “I know that I can be more effective today wearing a suit and tie and working on Wall Street than I can be dancing outside the walls of power,” he said. In 1994, he was struck by a car while crossing the street near his apartment building and died two weeks later from complications..

Advice for women living alone suggests leaving a pair of muddy, men’s boots outside your front door. If you don’t have a man in your life to donate them, you can buy them secondhand. My boyfriend’s old apartment had a broken peephole. Missing the interior glass, it instead functioned as a telescope for anyone standing outside to look down the hallway into the living room and kitchen. He lived there for five years and never noticed. There’s just so much that can go wrong with a home.

***

After the inflatables and before Cadillac Ranch, Ant Farm built a bulbous periscope of a house on the shores of a private Texas lake. It’s been compared to a space shuttle, a phallus, a swamp creature and a “time machine” (by Playboy). In The Dallas News, architecture critic Mark Lamster explains that the house was constructed using boat-building techniques. A frame of pipes set three feet apart were covered in layers of chicken wire and filled in with cement, says Lamster. Just six years after construction began, the structure required additional layers of moisture protection. The structure was called “House of the Century.”

In its prime, the upholstered interior of the house was a pink, padded esophagus of 1970s taste. The wooden floor, gleaming like a bowling alley, dips into seating pits. Tinted plexiglass windows stain the space with patches of yellow light. A female model looks longingly out at the lake, one nipple exposed. This prime was short-lived.

The sporting goods retail heiress who commissioned the house split with her husband. “It was one thing to put up with a house that was less than functional, but the added psychological weight of a divided family was too much for its ferro-concrete shell to bear,” Lamster writes. The July/August 2006 issue of Dwell magazine claimed that the House of the Century “lies mostly submerged in a Texas swamp.” Co-designer Chip Lord denied that the house was in such a state of disrepair and said that it was undergoing restoration, although photos accompanying Lamster’s 2019 piece show plants climbing the sides of the house, as if sucking it back into the landscape.

Ant Farm continued to create. On July 4th, 1975, two members drove a Cadillac through a pyramid of burning television sets. Artist Doug Hall introduced the piece while dressed as John F. Kennedy. “What has gone wrong with America is not a random visitation of fate. It is the result of forces that have assumed control of the American system…These forces are: militarism, monopoly, and the mass media,” Hall said.

Militarism, monopoly, and mass media: Another triad. In The Pentagon: The First Fifty Years, Alfred Goldberg writes, “I first saw the Pentagon in February 1943, less than a month after its completion. I identified it immediately, even though I had never seen a picture of it.” Empire is instantly recognizable. We may even know it better than our own home.

“The Pentagon has unity, oneness. It commands attention not because of its beauty–it is not a visual delight–but because of its size and its function… Even before its completion the building was described unfavorably and often disdainfully as gigantic, gargantuan, massive and fortress-like. Some called it a monstrosity,” Goldberg writes. The pentagon might be the most American building there is. After all, it is un-American to expect the pursuit of happiness to be its own protection.

III. Time

Americans see home ownership as an achievement signifying one’s independence — and by extension, control over the circumstances of our lives. We have little cultural conversation devoted to the idea that a house can be a thing that happens to you. A house may start out strong, functional and beautiful — but what happens when time turns against you?

The Internet is full of scary stories about the invisible problems that afflict a home: termites, mold, asbestos, lead paint, foreclosure. Our inability to see structural problems in the most basic sense (architectural) is just a symptom of our reluctance to acknowledge the architecture of loss so fundamental to an unequal society. The punishment for being an outsider in any sense. It’s much better to chalk these losses up to unnatural disaster.

Forget a poltergeist, how about EIFS? A stucco substitute that has led to hundreds, likely thousands, of destroyed homes. EIFS (Exterior Insulation and Finish System) was supposed to prevent moisture from getting into the walls. Unfortunately, it also doesn’t allow moisture to leave the walls. In 2002, the New York Times interviewed a lawyer who filed nearly 600 homeowner claims in New Jersey alone against one of the manufacturers of EIFS, Dryvit. A nationwide class-action settled in Tennessee three years later extended the same terms to other states, but it only partially covered repair costs. “Note – there can be similar problems with real stucco as well. Look for cracks around windows, joints in walls, where two walls come together, etc. Look where flashing ends at roof runoffs. From the ground, look at where the water has splashed up – does it show deterioration,” writes one self-identified Certified General Appraiser on an appraiser’s forum.

We hear about people who lose their houses suddenly, but not about the ones who lose their houses slowly. We don’t hear about what happens in the liminal space between diagnosis and loss. A Google search for “Dryvit damage” turns up images of moldy, black wood and gummy insulation that looks like it could be rung out in ropes. One ‘victim’ told The New York Times: “’We had set up a rainy day fund, and it didn’t rain, it poured.”

***

At the climax of the play Toad of Toad Hall, we find out that Toad Hall has been usurped by enemy animals. Badger, helpfully, reveals that an underground passage into Toad’s home will allow them to catch the invaders unaware. Toad is doubtful, having never heard of the tunnel before. “I know every inch of Toad Hall inside and out,” he says. Badger explains that he knows about the passage from Toad’s father, who gave strict instructions to only tell Toad about the secret entrance in case of an emergency. “That’s what he said, Toad. Knowing the sort of animal you were.”

Amarillo, Texas forms the third corner of an isosceles triangle with Austin and Marfa. It has neither the hyperreality of Austin’s curated Instagram graffiti or the cachet of Donald Judd’s expressionless Rubik’s cubes. After Cadillac Ranch, Amarillo is best known for the Pantex plant that employed many local residents through World War II and even now, although the facility’s mandate is to reduce America’s nuclear stockpile by dismantling old weapons. Pantex has earned Amarillo the nickname “Bomb City.”

In college, I went to a production of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. In the final act, the actors tore up the floor of the wooden house that constituted the set. Beneath the floorboards were hundreds of stuffed animals. Piles of plush bunnies and bears, loosely packed like popcorn. So many stuffed animals that the cold air from the fan would never reach you.

***

I’ve been writing about architecture for four years, and the Vitruvian triad encompasses nearly every criticism I could think to offer about a structure in the abstract. Yet, I am obsessed with all the ways this triad falls short, and the structures that fall outside of it. My own triad of the home is more of an equation: security and vision divided by time lapsed. The truth about a home is complicated. “The House of the Century” has been called a swamp creature, but tilt the scales of criticism and suddenly the occupants become the monsters, or perhaps the designers, for falling short of occupational longevity. “Now I ask you, my fellow Americans: Haven’t you ever wanted to put your foot through your television screen?” Doug Hall (as JFK) asks. The crowd applauds.

There were writers who did not think Dr. Farnsworth was a hysteric, and accordingly painted Mies van der Rohe as un-American. “Once people close their ears to the ecstatic gibberish they now hear in favor of the bad modern furniture and worse modern architecture, and open their eyes to the truth, then the reign of error will be over… the age of reason, beauty, and comfort i.e., the Next America, will be with us,” wrote Farnsworth House critic and House Beautiful editor Elizabeth Gordon. Frank Lloyd Wright, eager to be thought of as the premier American architect, was Gordon’s natural ally.

Philip Johnson’s “Glass House” was inspired by Mies van der Rohe but finished before Johnson’s mentor could complete his own. Like Ludwig II, Johnson was a closeted gay man who idolized Wagner. He spent his 30s dallying with Nazi propaganda. “One might easily interpret the Glass House solely as an exercise in camp, an outlet through which Johnson could resolve his decidedly unresolved homosexual inclinations,” writes Mark J. Stern. Johnson was both an anti-semite and a visionary, and his peers celebrated him as a quintessential citizen. He routinely tops lists of Best American Architects.

There are villains in architecture, and we routinely pick the wrong ones. In order to tell you what became of Toad Hall I have to tell you what became of Marsh — or, rather, how he was unmasked. In 2012, a Houston attorney representing ten teenage boys from Amarillo filed lawsuits against Marsh alleging sexual abuse, according to Texas Monthly. The attorney made contact with “easily a dozen other young males” who said they experienced abuse that fell outside the statute of limitations. By that point, Marsh had already quietly settled five other such lawsuits without admitting wrongdoing. With these next 10, it was no different. Marsh died in 2014 and Toad Hall has since been sold.

Near the house is yet another piece of architecture, winding away into entropy. It’s a piece of land art by Robert Smithson called Amarillo Ramp, commissioned by Stanley Marsh 3. The artist Emmy Thelander visited Amarillo Ramp in 2013. She wrote, “It appeared to be the soft-curving spine of a snake or an animal emerging from the ground. Unlike the crisp-edged form in photographs taken after its construction, the piece is now a semi-circular mound with gradually sloping sides.”

Smithson didn’t finish Amarillo Ramp himself: he died in 1973 while surveying the area from a plane. Doug Michels, co-founder of Ant Farm, also suffered an apparent accidental death. In 2003, he was consulting on a documentary near Sydney, Australia when he fell while hiking to an ocean lookout. The documentary was about a group of killer whales that collaborated with local fishermen to hunt baleen whales–a rare mutual relationship between the two species.

***

How are we meant to process all the extraordinary ways of losing when we can’t even process the ordinary ones? I buy the window alarm.

* * *

Daisy Alioto manages audience development at New York Review of Books. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Playboy and more. Her last Longreads feature was about a Hungarian expressionist painter and anti-fascist. We previously excerpted her feature on micro hotels.

Editor: Sari Botton

Fact checker: Matt Giles

Ellen-Wayland Smith | Longreads | March 2018 | 15 minutes (4,127 words)

One morning about a year ago I was sleeping on the sofa in my parents’ apartment when I was woken by the sound of my father dying in the next room.

At first I couldn’t tell what the noise was, or even locate where it was coming from. It was a ragged, scraping sound, like metal being pulled through tightly-packed glass. Then it shifted: like someone breathing in a viscous liquid in greedy gulps, aspirating yogurt. When I realized the noises were coming from my father’s throat, I froze.

According to the hospice manual I had scanned the night before, “death rattle” refers to the sound produced by “the pooling of secretions” in the throat after the body loses its ability to cough them up. “The air passing through the mucus causes this sound,” the booklet instructed me matter-of-factly. This symptom is listed under the rubric “When Death is Near.” Family members of the dying person frequently find this noise upsetting, according to the medical literature. Hospice workers recommend an anti-secretion medicine to dry up the mucous: one syringe-full against the gum.

We had had almost no time to prepare. A mere ten days earlier, my father had gone in to his doctor’s office to pick up the results of a routine scan, which turned out not to be routine at all: stage four pancreatic cancer. His physician, an old family friend, almost teared up when he delivered the news. “It is very difficult for me to say this to you,” he’d begun, gingerly. “Not as difficult as it is for me to hear it,” my father responded. He was 81 but looked much younger: six-foot-two, straight as a poker, salt-and-pepper hair and beard. After a bout with polio when he was 14, he’d never been sick a day in his life. We thought he was invincible.

My father’s fall into death was precipitous. Only three days after his diagnosis, he began to act funny: disoriented, forgetting where he was. He had trouble buttoning his shirt; tried to eat a bowl of soup by dipping the handle-end of the spoon into it. We attributed these behavioral quirks to anxiety. They turned out to be the result, instead, of small strokes — blood clots thrown off by the tumor. By day five he was in bed, with an IV, a catheter, and a morphine pump. He slipped in and out of consciousness. The last time I saw him awake, I asked if he’d like me to read him some Jorge Luis Borges, his favorite writer. “That would be nice,” he smiled. “I love you so much.” I squeezed his hand and went to get the book. By the time I came back with it, he was asleep again.

In death, you discover the body is baroque in its unintended flows and suppurations. It contorts and contracts until, finally, it returns to the clay from which it was pulled. It betrays our most earnest attempts to contain it, tame it, make it presentable. The body oozes: thick urine, yellow shading into crimson along the foggy licorice-rope of a catheter. Tar-like excrement. Sputum, blood, and saliva mixed, brought up from the lungs like sea foam, spotting my father’s beard, his chest, the morphine pump with frothy patches the color of lettuce. His eyes secrete tears and mucus in his sleep, an opaque glue that stretches and gaps like tiny spider webs across his pupils when he flutters his eyelids. I wipe his eye sockets with a wet cloth, dissolving the threads, but they come back. His arms have bleeds beneath the skin where needles poked, deep branching blues and purples, the shade of concord grapes.

The morning I woke to the sound of my father’s ragged last breaths, I stumbled down the hallway and into his room. My mother, sleeping on a cot by his side, was so drunk with grief she hadn’t even woken up. I stared at his laboring chest in disbelief. But by this point, I was used to the dying body’s betrayals, its refusals to be decent as it made the harrowing passage from being to thing. The death rattle held no surprises for me.

* * *

Since then I dream about descents and falls. Tumbles, gaffes, face-plants, sprawls. Once when I was sprinting nimbly up the three steps of my office building to get the door a colleague was kindly propping open for me, my foot slipped and I landed on my knees in front of him, scalding coffee streaming down my arms. I gazed up at him from this posture of abject genuflection and felt sorrier for him than for myself at our mutual discomfiture. I started giggling, and I am sure he had to bite his lip to keep from doing the same.

Charles Baudelaire analyzed the peculiar mirth humans feel in the face of a fellow creature falling, tracing the phenomenon of laughter back to Adam and Eve’s fall. “[Laughter] is one of the clearest marks of Satan in man, one of the innumerable seeds contained in the original symbolic apple,” he suggests . This is because laughter is a response to the pretense of human superiority, and its unmasking. The spectacle of a person falling embodies, with the perfection of an allegorical statue, the Folly of Pride. First you have a grip on your body; then, without warning, gravity has you in its grip. This reversal from being to thing, agent to patient, provokes mirth (when it doesn’t provoke its opposite, despair). Laughter erupts whenever we catch someone in this state of imposture: “So you thought you could remain upright forever, did you? Keep your head toward the heavens? Not so fast!”

I was used to the dying body’s betrayals, its refusals to be decent as it made the harrowing passage from being to thing.

* * *

One of the last times I saw my father, we were at our summer cottage on Lake Ontario. It was in August, three months before we would even know about the cancer eating away at his body. The sky was a brilliant, glassy blue; we were all healthy, and happy, warmed inside and out by the late summer sun.

Usually the lake is a flat expanse of green, but on certain windy days the water whips up into Atlantic-style waves, cresting white, perfect for body surfing. It was one of those days, and my daughters and nephew were splashing in the water when my 5-year-old niece asked if I could take her in. The beach down to the lake is rock-strewn and, although the stones are rounded by erosion, walking over them involves equal parts balance and tolerance for pain, if one doesn’t have beach shoes (which we never did). The feat gets even trickier once you reach the water’s edge: the rocks are wet and skimmed with algae, a perilous five-foot stretch before you get to the soft sand bar, and one misplaced foot can send you sprawling. The kids were calling for Grandpa to get in, too, so I hoisted my niece up onto my hip and my father and I headed out to join them. We were shin-deep in water when a large wave came washing in, and we both went down.

My hands were occupied securing my niece upright beside me against the oncoming waves: one big wave and her small frame would be dashed against the rocks. Every time I tried to rock myself to standing, I was smacked back flat on my spine. My father, too, seemed unable to get a purchase on the slippery ground — couldn’t flip to crawling position in order, then, to right himself.

What I learned in labor: to be obedient to the mystery of something that surpasses not only the limits of your physical capacity to suffer, but of your capacity to know.

Ellen-Wayland Smith | Longreads | March 2018 | 15 minutes (4,127 words)

One morning about a year ago I was sleeping on the sofa in my parents’ apartment when I was woken by the sound of my father dying in the next room.

At first I couldn’t tell what the noise was, or even locate where it was coming from. It was a ragged, scraping sound, like metal being pulled through tightly-packed glass. Then it shifted: like someone breathing in a viscous liquid in greedy gulps, aspirating yogurt. When I realized the noises were coming from my father’s throat, I froze.

According to the hospice manual I had scanned the night before, “death rattle” refers to the sound produced by “the pooling of secretions” in the throat after the body loses its ability to cough them up. “The air passing through the mucus causes this sound,” the booklet instructed me matter-of-factly. This symptom is listed under the rubric “When Death is Near.” Family members of the dying person frequently find this noise upsetting, according to the medical literature. Hospice workers recommend an anti-secretion medicine to dry up the mucous: one syringe-full against the gum.

We had had almost no time to prepare. A mere ten days earlier, my father had gone in to his doctor’s office to pick up the results of a routine scan, which turned out not to be routine at all: stage four pancreatic cancer. His physician, an old family friend, almost teared up when he delivered the news. “It is very difficult for me to say this to you,” he’d begun, gingerly. “Not as difficult as it is for me to hear it,” my father responded. He was 81 but looked much younger: six-foot-two, straight as a poker, salt-and-pepper hair and beard. After a bout with polio when he was 14, he’d never been sick a day in his life. We thought he was invincible.

My father’s fall into death was precipitous. Only three days after his diagnosis, he began to act funny: disoriented, forgetting where he was. He had trouble buttoning his shirt; tried to eat a bowl of soup by dipping the handle-end of the spoon into it. We attributed these behavioral quirks to anxiety. They turned out to be the result, instead, of small strokes — blood clots thrown off by the tumor. By day five he was in bed, with an IV, a catheter, and a morphine pump. He slipped in and out of consciousness. The last time I saw him awake, I asked if he’d like me to read him some Jorge Luis Borges, his favorite writer. “That would be nice,” he smiled. “I love you so much.” I squeezed his hand and went to get the book. By the time I came back with it, he was asleep again.

In death, you discover the body is baroque in its unintended flows and suppurations. It contorts and contracts until, finally, it returns to the clay from which it was pulled. It betrays our most earnest attempts to contain it, tame it, make it presentable. The body oozes: thick urine, yellow shading into crimson along the foggy licorice-rope of a catheter. Tar-like excrement. Sputum, blood, and saliva mixed, brought up from the lungs like sea foam, spotting my father’s beard, his chest, the morphine pump with frothy patches the color of lettuce. His eyes secrete tears and mucus in his sleep, an opaque glue that stretches and gaps like tiny spider webs across his pupils when he flutters his eyelids. I wipe his eye sockets with a wet cloth, dissolving the threads, but they come back. His arms have bleeds beneath the skin where needles poked, deep branching blues and purples, the shade of concord grapes.

The morning I woke to the sound of my father’s ragged last breaths, I stumbled down the hallway and into his room. My mother, sleeping on a cot by his side, was so drunk with grief she hadn’t even woken up. I stared at his laboring chest in disbelief. But by this point, I was used to the dying body’s betrayals, its refusals to be decent as it made the harrowing passage from being to thing. The death rattle held no surprises for me.

* * *

Since then I dream about descents and falls. Tumbles, gaffes, face-plants, sprawls. Once when I was sprinting nimbly up the three steps of my office building to get the door a colleague was kindly propping open for me, my foot slipped and I landed on my knees in front of him, scalding coffee streaming down my arms. I gazed up at him from this posture of abject genuflection and felt sorrier for him than for myself at our mutual discomfiture. I started giggling, and I am sure he had to bite his lip to keep from doing the same.

Charles Baudelaire analyzed the peculiar mirth humans feel in the face of a fellow creature falling, tracing the phenomenon of laughter back to Adam and Eve’s fall. “[Laughter] is one of the clearest marks of Satan in man, one of the innumerable seeds contained in the original symbolic apple,” he suggests . This is because laughter is a response to the pretense of human superiority, and its unmasking. The spectacle of a person falling embodies, with the perfection of an allegorical statue, the Folly of Pride. First you have a grip on your body; then, without warning, gravity has you in its grip. This reversal from being to thing, agent to patient, provokes mirth (when it doesn’t provoke its opposite, despair). Laughter erupts whenever we catch someone in this state of imposture: “So you thought you could remain upright forever, did you? Keep your head toward the heavens? Not so fast!”

I was used to the dying body’s betrayals, its refusals to be decent as it made the harrowing passage from being to thing.

* * *

One of the last times I saw my father, we were at our summer cottage on Lake Ontario. It was in August, three months before we would even know about the cancer eating away at his body. The sky was a brilliant, glassy blue; we were all healthy, and happy, warmed inside and out by the late summer sun.

Usually the lake is a flat expanse of green, but on certain windy days the water whips up into Atlantic-style waves, cresting white, perfect for body surfing. It was one of those days, and my daughters and nephew were splashing in the water when my 5-year-old niece asked if I could take her in. The beach down to the lake is rock-strewn and, although the stones are rounded by erosion, walking over them involves equal parts balance and tolerance for pain, if one doesn’t have beach shoes (which we never did). The feat gets even trickier once you reach the water’s edge: the rocks are wet and skimmed with algae, a perilous five-foot stretch before you get to the soft sand bar, and one misplaced foot can send you sprawling. The kids were calling for Grandpa to get in, too, so I hoisted my niece up onto my hip and my father and I headed out to join them. We were shin-deep in water when a large wave came washing in, and we both went down.

My hands were occupied securing my niece upright beside me against the oncoming waves: one big wave and her small frame would be dashed against the rocks. Every time I tried to rock myself to standing, I was smacked back flat on my spine. My father, too, seemed unable to get a purchase on the slippery ground — couldn’t flip to crawling position in order, then, to right himself.

What I learned in labor: to be obedient to the mystery of something that surpasses not only the limits of your physical capacity to suffer, but of your capacity to know.

Rahawa Haile | Longreads | February 2018 | 12 minutes (3,078 words)

(Spoiler alert! This essay contains numerous spoilers about the film Black Panther.)

By the time I sat down to watch Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther, a film about a thriving, fictional African country that has never been colonized, 12 hours had passed since the prime minister of Ethiopia resigned following years of protest and civil unrest. It would be another 12 hours before the country declared a state of emergency and enforced martial law, as the battle for succession began. Ethiopia has appeared in many conversations about Black Panther since the film’s release, despite an obvious emphasis on Wakanda, the Black Panther’s kingdom, being free of outside influences — and finances.

While interviews with Coogler reveal he based Wakanda on Lesotho, a small country surrounded on all sides by South Africa, it has become clear that most discussions about the film share a similar geography; its borders are dimensional rather than physical, existing in two universes at once. How does one simultaneously argue the joys of recognizing the Pan-African signifiers within Wakanda, as experienced by Africans watching the film, and the limits of Pan-Africanism in practice, as experienced by a diaspora longing for Africa? The beauty and tragedy of Wakanda, as well as our discourse, is that it exists in an intertidal zone: not always submerged in the fictional, as it owes much of its aesthetic to the Africa we know, but not entirely real either, as no such country exists on the African continent. The porosity and width of that border complicates an already complicated task, shedding light on the infinite points of reference possible for this film that go beyond subjective readings.

***

I live with the profound privilege, as a black woman in America, of knowing where I come from, of having the language of my oldest ancestors be the first one I learned. When it comes to Black Panther, I know what it means for Namibians and fans of Nnedi Okorofor’s Binti series to see Himba otjize slathered on the hair of someone who sits on the king’s council. What it means for me as a person with ties to the Horn of Africa to see numerous meskel, the Ethiopian cross, dangling from another leader’s belt. What it means for the most advanced science laboratory in the world to always be alive with South African song. I am grateful for it because I have spent my life seeing the story of Africa reduced to its most stereotypical common denominator. And I know, with every cell in my body, what it means for Wakanda’s tapestry in this film — woven from numerous African cultures — to be steeped above all else in celebration, in pride, and in the absence of shame.

Coogler’s Black Panther tells the story of T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman), the superhero Black Panther who becomes the king of Wakanda following his father’s death. He is protected by the Dora Milaje, an all-women group of formidable soldiers led by Okoye (Danai Gurira) whose lover is the conservative, refugee-averse W’Kabi (Daniel Kaluuya). T’Challa’s sister, Shuri (Letitia Wright), is a science genius who designs his weapons, his Black Panther suit, and all manner of related tech. His ex, Nakia (Lupita Nyong’O), is a spy for the kingdom, committed to helping the most vulnerable in Africa, despite the king’s insistence on keeping Wakanda hidden from the world. M’Baku (Winston Duke) is the leader of the Jabari, a tribe within Wakanda that has rejected the methods of the monarchy and chosen to live up in the mountains. Finally, Erik “Killmonger” Stevens (Michael B. Jordan), serves as the film’s rage-filled antagonist, driven by revenge and a desire for black liberation by any means necessary.

Black Panther spends the majority of its runtime examining what a hidden nation like Wakanda — wealthy, technologically advanced, and home to the planet’s most powerful natural resource, vibranium — owes black populations spread across the globe. I’ve thought extensively of the burden placed on Coogler, on what an American production of this magnitude owes the continent that cradles its story, keeping in mind what centuries of false narratives about Africa have failed to convey. I believe it is this: A film set in Africa — unable by its very nature to be about Africa — whose cosmology, woven from dozens of countries exploited by empire, consists of its joys. It is a star chart of majesties more than simulacra.

How then does one criticize what is unquestionably the best Marvel movie to date by every conceivable metric known to film criticism? How best to explain that Black Panther can be a celebration of blackness, yes; a silencing of whiteness, yes; a meshing of African cultures and signifiers — all this! — while also feeling like an exercise in sustained forgetting? That the convenience of having a fake country within a real continent is the way we can take inspiration from the latter without dwelling on its losses, or the causes of them. Black Panther is an American film through and through, one heavily invested in white America’s political absence from its African narrative.

When Killmonger goads a museum curator early on in the film, calling out a history of looting, it is condemnation that falls squarely on Britain’s shoulders. Rarely must the audience think about the C.I.A.’s very real history in Africa. The fact that viewers were steered, at any point, into rooting for Martin Freeman, a British actor playing an American C.I.A. operative who attempts to purchase stolen resources from a white South African arms dealer, means that even a cinematic turducken of imperialist history gets a pass.

For all the Jabari barking and jokes made at Freeman’s expense as a colonizer, none of it makes up for the fact that a C.I.A. agent who casually speaks about destabilizing governments in an African monarch’s house doesn’t get punched in the face. The fact that every black character in that scene takes Freeman’s words in stride is indicative of a disconnect that has nothing to do with Wakanda’s self-isolation — not if Okoye is out here making “Greased Lightning” jokes, Shuri asking “what are thooooose?,” and T’Challa not blinking at the mention of SoundCloud. This blurring between who Freeman is, in a Wakanda where T’Challa is attempting to reclaim the throne, and what he is to America is clearest in a sequence where he follows Black Panther’s orders to shoot down Wakandan planes carrying Wakandan weapons that could destabilize the most powerful nations. The fact that these orders are aligned with the C.I.A.’s interest is an unimportant coincidence, buried beneath the viewer’s excitement to see the titular hero succeed.

The convenience of having a fake country within a real continent is the way we can take inspiration from Africa without dwelling on its losses.

Nonetheless, Black Panther is an undeniable joy to watch, even it if it is, at times, hard to experience. I can tell you that one of the most important things I saw, in a film set in Africa in 2018, wasn’t just the film’s lack of whiteness, but the almost complete absence of China, a country whose economic expansion throughout the continent has been singular and complicated. What’s more, for all of Killmonger’s liberation talk, Black Panther is also about the unrooted feelings of first-generation Americans, which for all intents and purposes Killmonger is. People who, despite knowing their origins, know that they will to some extent always be lost to them. Killmonger’s Wakandan-American rage and potential liberation comes from a uniquely complicated place, but we’ve yet to conjure a word for the pain of that proximity. Understandably, Black Panther only has room for so much politics, but it is important to acknowledge that it is in this selection that it reaches and abandons so many people. The film was never going to be everything to everyone — even if it meant everything to everyone. The film’s righteous anger is grounded in a real America with real problems, while its hopes lie in a fictional country distinctly removed from the reality of Africa.

***

In Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, Black Panther spent its opening weekend sold out five times a day out of a possible five showings. A question I repeatedly found myself asking is where Africans watching this film fit within the Afrofuturist possibility of Wakanda? How do you watch the dream of Africa, set within the real Africa, created by filmmakers in the diaspora, and then emerge to martial law? How hollow does Killmonger’s posturing and desire for a bloody uprising of the masses come across to a viewer living in the throes of one?

I know that when I leave my theater in Oakland, a disabled elder and real Black Panther will be on the verge of a no-fault eviction from her home. Five months will have passed since I watched the premiere of an Oakland-based web series about the racialized disaster of gentrification in the Bay Area at the Grand Lake Theater, the same place where Coogler made an appearance on the opening night of Black Panther. It is worth noting that the word “capitalism” does not appear once in Black Panther, despite its focus on black liberation. Killmonger’s slash-and-burn approach to freedom, and T’Challa’s future coding boot camp for black American youth, both fail to address how oppression, particularly in the 21st century, is systemic.

The divides across the diaspora about the limitations of Killmonger’s methodology hinge on whether one believes all black revolution is created equal, if the ends justify the means. But this is all a sleight of hand. Black Panther left me unconvinced that Killmonger’s desire for black liberation outweighed his desire for revenge, and it is difficult to see revolution driven by personal revenge as more than a selfish grab for power. No damaged villain is sympathetic enough to be granted carte blanche as an agent of chaos. Killmonger may want black liberation from white oppressors around the world, but he needs Wakandan monarchy to cede to imperialism under his rule. When Killmonger says, “The sun will never set on the Wakandan Empire,” he is also referring to himself. His tenure as autocrat will never end.

It seems ludicrous and deeply conservative to think that the final form of black radicalism is imperialism buoyed by unchecked global arms distribution — just ask America. And there is no Black Power Dark Cerebro in Black Panther with which to target the world’s elite. An uprising by scattered, armed masses in the 21st century is less likely to result in a thousand Toussaint L’Ouvertures than an ending like that in Ousmane Sembene’s Camp de Thiaroye, where West African troops are slaughtered by the French after protesting how they’re forced to live.

As for Wakanda’s responsibility to the world, it’s safe to say that after 20 years of watching the latest incarnation of superhero movies — 16 years of cringing at the consequences of Peter Parker not using his superpowers to stop a thief — isolationism is never the answer. Early on in the film, audiences are encouraged to consider the middle ground proposed by Nakia, one where Wakanda helps to make the world a better place without razing it to the ground. She is quickly dismissed by T’Challa, whose allure is unsurprisingly nominal compared to the women with whom he surrounds himself. And it confounds me that the film’s ending is seen as T’Challa meeting Killmonger halfway as opposed to deferring to Nakia’s original proposal minutes into the first act.

I live with the profound privilege, as a black woman in America, of knowing where I come from. Of having the language of my oldest ancestors be the first one I learned.

If T’Challa as a character feels like the least interesting part of Black Panther, it might be because he is not the primary character pushing the narrative forward. Instead, he is in a constant position of defense. He defends the kidnapped women from the militia in Nigeria. He defends against M’Buku when he challenges the throne. He defends Agent Ross when Klaue starts shooting at him in the casino. He defends his throne, yet again, against Killmonger when he comes for it. He tries to keep the planes from leaving Wakanda. Black Panther is a king who is always catching up, both ideologically and physically, such as when Nakia and Okoye rush after Klaue and leave T’Challa to follow. (That car chase marks one of the few times T’Challa is the one actively in pursuit, while the action sequence that thrilled me most didn’t involve the Black Panther at all, but featured the Dora Milaje fighting Killmonger as a unit.)

Analyzing the film’s antagonist is more complicated. Killmonger is written as pure rage, and it’s hard for a man written as pure rage, however justified, to be a good villain. What’s impressive about Black Panther is that it asks us to examine the grey area of that designator. Unfortunately, the Killmonger we see on screen is one who has read the Baldwin line “To be black and conscious in America is to be in a constant state of rage,” and ignored Audre Lorde’s “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” The film is an ode to the exceptionalism of black American rage that, while singular, cannot speak for the majority of the diaspora. There is no precedent for worldwide liberation.

What’s more, Killmonger’s politics completely ignore the ways power structures overlap to oppress individuals. He is the type of man who would shoot down the concept of intersectionality if he met it in the streets. He kills his girlfriend. He brags about killing people of color in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as his own brothers and sisters in Africa. He is quick to assault an unarmed priestess who questions his orders. He delights in killing one of the Dora Milaje. In truth, I can only see him as a sympathetic victim if I squint hard enough at the past that made him instead of his actions on-screen.

Regardless, from T’Chaka and W’Kabi’s isolationist approach, to T’Challa’s inability to choose between isolation and visibility, to Killmonger’s ruthless pursuit of power — one fueled by the belief that America was built on the rage of white men and that a better world might emerge from the rage of black ones — men were never going to save Wakanda. Danai Gurira is the most exceptional actor in the film, and it’s worth noting, to Coogler’s credit, how the majority of humor in Black Panther is performed by the women at the expense of the men, especially T’Challa. It is what makes the king’s relationship with the women in his life who ground him feel familial, a humbled framing of masculinity I wish more filmmakers would employ. T’Challa anchors the narrative, but it is the women he is surrounded by who anchor the film and save him from himself. Killmonger has no such luxury, and despite his desire for a global community of free black people, his end is a lonely one.

The film is an ode to the exceptionalism of black American rage that, while singular, cannot speak for the majority of the diaspora. There is no precedent for worldwide liberation.

It is these quiet scenes that haunt me most throughout the film. The looks T’Challa, Okoye, and Nakia have on their faces when they see Wakanda from midair, which also serves as the audience’s first glimpse of the country. The awe with which T’Challa says, “This never gets old.” It’s one of the most important scenes of the film: To not just know where home is but to have access to it, to know that they belong. Later, the desperate exchange between Nakia and Okoye after Killmonger defeats T’Challa is equally heartrending. These are women whose allegiances are subtly examined and confronted: Okoye’s to protocol, Nakia’s to Wakanda, and both to each other. The way Okoye, anguished, all but vomits the words, “I am loyal to that throne, no matter who sits on it.” These actors do so much with so little while conveying incalculable pain in a matter of minutes. For all the talk of Black Panther’s technological accomplishments, it is important to remember that the film doesn’t just give us a star-studded cast but the full extent of their talent.

***

Black Panther may be a Disney product, but it would be foolish to see a film of this historical significance as intended solely for casual consumption. “This is not just a movie about a black superhero; it’s very much a black movie,” wrote journalist Jamil Smith for TIME. That blackness is global. Its very existence — Coogler’s singular execution of its $200 million budget — is a declaration of self-worth, an act of defiance aimed at an industry that has long undervalued black creatives on both sides of the camera. The film as a statement on black virtue should be celebrated, its examination of black possibility exalted, and its disparate philosophies parsed to the extent the viewer wishes.

The fact that my focus in this piece was less about the film as product and more about its politics is itself an accomplishment, a signifier of its exceptional quality. Every frame in Black Panther felt like a gift. A beautifully lit, well-moisturized, spectacularly choreographed gift. What I will remember about Black Panther’s opening weekend is the tragic relief of arguing the ideological calisthenics of a fictional African country instead of whether it is a shithole.

Black Panther’s audience hears the question “Who are you?” repeatedly over the course of two hours. The Queen-Mother Ramonda (Angela Bassett) shouts at T’Challa, “Show him who you are!” when M’Baku has the upper hand at Warrior Falls. It is the question Killmonger, bound by Wakandan chains, begs the king’s council to ask him when they first meet him. Indeed, it is the line that ends the film, uttered by a young black boy in Oakland peering up at a king no longer in hiding. That we have spent the week that follows asking ourselves the same question is the film’s lasting gift. Not only reflecting on who we are, but who are we to each other. T’Challa never apologizes to Killmonger for what his father did, for everything that was taken from him, and it is the film’s most damning omission. There is no healing that can come without the voiced expression of empathy. And I hope those who navigate the waters of their identity can eventually be greeted at a lasting shore with just that.

* * *

Rahawa Haile is an Eritrean-American writer. Her work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic, Outside Magazine, Pacific Standard, BuzzFeed, Hazlitt, and Rolling Stone.

Editors: Sari Botton and Michelle Legro