Like the album and tour with which it shares a name, Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé seeks to be a celebration of Black queer joy. From the start, Beyoncé preaches her desire to create a “safe space.” “Renaissance means a new beginning,” she says; it’s a balm “after all we’ve been through in the world.” But what exactly is she referring to? The onslaught of death and illness brought on by the continuing pandemic? The laws aimed at criminalizing trans children and adults? The rising misogyny, homophobia, and anti-Blackness that leads to grave violence? The various, ongoing genocides? Beyoncé gives us no context for what she’s referring to or how it touches the shores of a life dominated and driven by the kind of wealth that insulates her from harm. Her words reflect broadly liberal pablum meant to give the appearance of care and mean just enough that her fans can project radicalness upon her but not so much that she would ruffle anyone enough for her to lose money or be forced to stand for something.

Beyoncé has been a remote star for years, someone far more content with having her dedicated Hive project upon her than speaking for herself. This makes the behind-the-scenes moments of her latest concert documentary, which are so primed toward engendering intimacy, rather curious. Every time you think you’ve seen behind the curtain, you realize there’s another curtain upon another stage. This isn’t new for her. Consider previous projects like the labored 2013 film Life Is But a Dream and the more successfully realized Homecoming in 2019. From this vantage point, fake intimacy is a currency she utilizes to give the appearance of revelation even if she actually remains as closed as a fist. Beyoncé positions herself not as a goddess bestowing a peek of humanity to her loyal subjects but as a relatable figure we can and should connect with. But if you have cameras on you all the time, even when you’re supposed to be “off,” when do you take down the performative mask? It isn’t even when she has knee surgery, a moment carefully documented on camera. For Beyoncé, a woman known to film her every move and house it in a temperature-controlled archive, everything is performance and each performance is merely a means of brand extension.

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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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Gyasi Hall | Longreads | September 12, 2023 | 21 minutes (5,698 words)

The seventy-first issue of MAD Magazine, cover dated June 1962, contains a noteworthy entry in Antonio Prohías’ Spy vs. Spy, a comic strip depicting Looney Tunes-style espionage between two pointy-headed, monochromatic secret agents. This particular installment isn’t the series’ best strip: it’s not the one with the most elaborate explosions, the most clever ending, or the one that’s most exemplary of Prohías’ precise and peerless art style. But it is, for me, the most Spy vs. Spy strip ever, the one that best distills the already simplified distillate and sums up the whole enterprise.

One spy, sporting a trenchcoat, a wide-brimmed G-Man fedora, and secret service shades—a collection of clichéd noir signifiers, all in stark black—stands out in a field with a bucket of water. The moon is full and beautiful. The other spy, identical except in blinding white, peeks out from behind a tree, trying to suss out what his rival is up to. Black Spy stares at the moon through an elaborate sextant, adjusting various settings and making mental calculations, finally drawing an X on the ground with a compass before setting the bucket down. As he leaves, White Spy sneaks up to it, peers inside, trying to figure out what this could all mean. In the last panel, Black Spy has snuck back around to give White Spy a swift kick in the ass, grinning triumphantly as his enemy falls headfirst into the bucket, soaked and seeing stars. 

This is the essence of Spy vs. Spy: delightfully stupid without ever being mean, delightfully simple without ever being dumb. Prohías’ comics are as perfect an example of the medium as you’re ever likely to find—even more so, I’d argue, than other all-time strips like Peanuts or Calvin and Hobbes, since its wordless pantomime operates so effortlessly using the mechanics of graphic narrative as its sole language. The above strip works so well because it forgoes high-concept gadgetry to make the petty, low-stakes reality of the spies’ eternal struggle that much clearer. It’s a perfect way to frame the proceeding complexities of the franchise as a whole.

And make no mistake: Spy vs. Spy is a franchise, a bona fide phenomenon, as ubiquitous as comic strips get without the nostalgic momentum of the above GOATs, the “who the hell thinks this is funny?” anti-spectacle of something like Dilbert, or the dearth of basic premise that makes Garfield so ripe for memery. Decades and decades of comics, sure, but also video games, segments on TV shows, T-shirts, trading cards, a board game, action figures, plush toys, Halloween masks, NASCAR promotions, fucking Mountain Dew commercials. The famous image of the spies, shaking hands while holding explosives behind their backs with the tenderness you’d afford fresh fruit, is famous for a reason.

But like the spies themselves, the image we have of something is often what gets us in trouble. As consumers and customers, we are often trained not to see art (or tools or people) as complex things with a story, or the evolving context that informs their continued existence. This not-seeing is often a foundational ingredient of success. The image—the idea of an idea—is what everyone will know, what everyone will buy. I would like to look at Spy vs. Spy in chronological order to tell you the story of a simple, stupid thing. Knowing, after all, is half the battle.

Antonio Prohías was brilliant. He was an unmatched artist whose simple style belied his immense talents, and his mastery of cartoon logic and physical comedy puts him up there as one of the greatest cartoonists ever. As already mentioned, comic readers are encouraged as consumers to ignore the writers and artists who actually make the things they love—and with comic strips specifically, you also have to contend with the bespoke illusion created by syndication. Readers who open the funny pages of their local newspaper are taught to encounter their handful of daily panels as appearing out of thin air. The presentation is, of course, the point: exhaling slightly out of your nose at whatever the family from Baby Blues is up to is designed to feel inevitable. Can you, without looking it up, name the original creators of famous but not omnipresent strips like The Family Circus, Hägar the Horrible, Dennis the Menace, or Beetle Bailey, let alone the people who work on them now? I can’t either. No one made the strips; they captured them. It’s all just reportage. 

The satirical tone of MAD Magazine helped mitigate these issues somewhat, but only because Prohías’ life story (which we’ll get to shortly) helped to sell the brand as equal parts mischievous, politically profound, and genuinely rebellious. Early Spy strips appeared with the following prelude: “Antonio Prohías is a famous Cuban artist who defied the censorship of the Castro regime with anti-communist cartoons—until he was forced to flee Havana with his life. Now, he graces the pages of MAD with his cartoon sequence of friendly rivalry called—Spy vs Spy.” While it’s cool to see that context for a strip about convoluted traps and Acme explosions, merely acknowledging something isn’t enough to legitimately combat the racism that creates America’s apathy toward all things international. Besides, these blurbs were clearly designed to gain MAD clout via association with Prohías’ politics.

In many ways, by the time he got to MAD, he had enjoyed a more successful and influential career than the vast majority of his co-workers. Despite Fulgencio Batista and his proxies’ oppressive tenures, Cuba had a robust media landscape during the mid-twentieth century, including an ecosystem of local and state newspapers and magazines. It was the perfect proving ground for a tenacious young artist to demonstrate his keen-eyed understanding of the nation’s cultural and political landscape. Prohías’ first professional publication was a cartoon in the newspaper Alerta in 1938, at just 17. Steady gigs soon followed: at one point, Prohías was working for five periodicals at once. In 1946, at 25, he became the first recipient of the Juan Gualberto Gómez gold medal and purse, a prestigious prize for Cuban journalism he would go on to win five more times. Add to that his three Ricardo de la Torriente prizes for best cartoon of the year (’48, ’49, and ’52), the Salon de Humoristico Publication first prize for best advertising cartoon (’55), and the International American Society of Journalists award for best cartoonist of the year selected from more than 20 Latin American countries (’60), and it’s clear that Prohías was nothing to fuck with long before he left Cuba. 

Some of Prohías’ pre-Spy work sits in the realm of traditional political cartoons, single-panel visual gags like a peace sign as the blade of a guillotine, but the best of his early cartoons are the ones that begin to merge his political insights with the absurd lingua franca of cartoons themselves: exaggeration, slapstick, etc. These cartoons are full-on comic strips, usually starring recurring satirical characters. One character, El Hombre Siniestro, was a sadistic villain Prohías said was “born out of the national psychosis of the Cuban people,” as he felt “an element of fatality in the air, right before and after revolution.” In my favorite strip he stars in, El Hombre Siniestro is troubled by a dream of a man stranded on a desert island, so he wakes up, chugs multiple bottles of water, and goes back to bed, smiling contentedly now that the tide has risen and the man has drowned. Another character, Tovarich, was an evil communist, an obvious stand-in for Castro. He’s a scheming government agent, an antecedent to the spies: in one strip, he gives a man a present that, when opened, releases a spring-loaded hammer and sickle that simultaneously decapitates him and stamps his foot. 

The contents of these strips, combined with the ubiquity of Prohías’ work in the late ’50s, angered many revolutionaries, including Castro himself. The Tovarich strips were “set” in Russia to maintain a level of plausible deniability—you could typically see the domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral in the corner of at least one panel per strip—but the message was obvious. At one point, while Castro was giving a speech, he whipped a crowd of his supporters into a frenzy, accusing Prohías of being a counterrevolutionary who was working for the CIA. The crowd called for his execution, chanting Paredón para Prohías! Paredón para Prohías!

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Between his tainted reputation and the regime shutting down independent news outlets, work dried up fast. Prohías was forced to take up odd jobs to supplement his cartooning, and what work he did get published was often followed by lengthy coletillas, extended addenda added by government censors that undermined his points and accused him of treason. He lived in this hostile atmosphere for a year as opportunities evaporated, colleagues turned on him, and people spat at him on the street. Because he was one of the earliest public figures to question the fervor around Castro, escape was relatively easy: In May 1960, Prohías boarded a commercial flight to New York City, his family following soon after. He worked in a clothing factory, publishing cartoons criticizing the Cuban government in a few Spanish-language American dailies. He would never return to his home country.

Looking to break into American comics proper, Prohías spent whatever down time he had studying various periodicals, even before he made his escape. He correctly assumed the work that had made him (in)famous in Cuba wouldn’t translate well in the States. U.S. comics culture was, at this point, largely defined by A) increasingly meta reinventions of DC’s golden age superheroes, and B) the academic vulgarity of underground “comix.” Both of these subgenres were radically different expressions of the same nostalgic impulse, a reexamination of what comics had meant/could mean to a generation of kids who had grown up with the lethally flawed self-importance of American exceptionalism, as well as the earliest version of what we now think of as the “comic book industry.” Both were in full swing, and while seismic shifts in each industry were still a few years away, self-reflection had begun: these people were now teenagers, college kids, young adults, people who were starting to see beyond the figures they’d grown up with and the simple messages they carried, people who were beginning to imagine what the future could look like. If Prohías was going to make it in the U.S. the way he had in Cuba, he had to find a way to use his art to speak to this phenomenon. 

Prohías saw something of a kindred spirit in MAD and its editors, the self-described “usual gang of idiots.” Their work was crude and juvenile, yes, but it was smart, too—playful, stylistically diverse, and overtly political. MAD’s publisher, William Gaines, knew a thing or two about censorship, in his own way. His company, EC Comics, had made its bones on the extreme violence and sexuality of crime and horror titles like Tales from the Crypt and Shock SuspenStories. But after the Comics Code Authority formed in 1954 to fight against the moral panic surrounding the medium, a list of rules for opt-in regulation so strict that publishers who agreed to it couldn’t even put “terror” or “horror” in the titles of their books, distributors had balked at EC’s more scandalous titles. Series were canceled; creators were let go. MAD was the last title left standing, having switched to a magazine format early on. 

While Prohías’ and Gaines’ experiences are obviously not comparable, Gaines’ sense of anti-authoritarianism went a long way in shaping MAD’s ethos—and making it attractive to Prohías. On July 12th, 1960, two months and change after he came to the U.S., Prohías visited MAD HQ on Lafayette Street. He brought his daughter Marta with him because her English was better than his. It happened to be her 14th birthday. 

The so-called “MAD-men,” in their recollections of this initial meeting, stress instant infatuation with Prohías’ work; Marta tells a slightly different story. According to her, the editors first told her father to take the strip elsewhere, since they didn’t have any openings at the moment. He explained that he had created Spy vs. Spy specifically for MAD and “would not have them published anywhere else,” theatrically beginning to tear up his handiwork in front of them. (They stopped him.) She also says that they asked him to sketch something for them in the room; apparently, it wasn’t the quality of the doodle that convinced them of his talent, but the posture of his hand, two decades of skillful practice revealed in how he held the pencil. Ultimately, Prohías and his daughter walked back out onto the New York City streets having sold three strips for $800—an amount that today would be worth a little more than 10 times that. 

Later, Nick Meglin, a former editor at MAD, would recall how Prohías had returned to the office a week later with 10 more strips. “The staff’s initial reaction was ambivalent,” Meglin said. “Didn’t this guy understand the magazine wanted only the few pages we’d bought from his first visit?” After seeing how “diabolically clever” these new installments were, he said, the editors knew they had “stumbled into an ongoing feature.” 

Stumbled indeed.

A lot of people don’t really know how to talk about comics. In their readings, content takes priority over context. Even those who understand comics as a unique literary genre see a plotless, virtually wordless screwball strip like Spy vs. Spy and see nothing but clever fireworks. It’s a mindset that’s corrosive to a comic’s integrity. Within this kind of reading, style and storyline are the only things worth taking away from any graphic narrative. 

At this point, the usual line would be something like “Spy vs. Spy is a commentary on the meaningless violence and espionage of the Cold War.” Which, like, yeah. But there’s a lot more going on than that, a lot more to the world Prohías has created, even though it’s a world where a phone receiver can be replaced with pistol so a prank call leads to an unplanned suicide. To describe the strip’s virtues in terms of narrative cohesion is to ignore any nuance stemming from the artist’s lived experience. 

To talk thoroughly about Spy vs. Spy is to interrogate the anatomy of metaphor. Posited: the power of a good metaphor doesn’t stem from the fact that the metaphorical comparison (eyes as bright as diamonds, a road that winds like a snake, whatever) creates a relationship, but how it transforms that relationship, bringing new richness to both sides of the metaphor. To borrow I.A. Richards’ terminology from The Philosophy of Rhetoric, those sides are the vehicle (the figurative comparison that’s being invoked) and the tenor (the subject that’s being described by said comparison). Ideally, the former wouldn’t merely act as a conduit for the latter. A truly dynamic metaphor becomes smarter and more interesting once you consider each arm of the connection and how they interact. This is why so many political cartoons are boring and stupid regardless of the politics behind them, why they have to label everything so you know what the hell they’re talking about. They focus so much on The Point that they don’t bother making that point in a way that’s engaging for the reader.

Prohías never lost sight of this. Spy vs. Spy is a political cartoon, but it’s not a Political Cartoon. The strip stakes its claim immediately via a single thematic masterstroke—overlaying the blind jingoism and deranged paranoia of Cold War politics onto the endlessly resilient slapstick framework of classic cartoons—and then spends the rest of its existence exploring every facet of that premise by remixing the established formula. 

Think about how many satirical pitfalls Spy vs. Spy avoids simply by the nature of its setup. The spies are obvious stand-ins, but despite the loaded nature of their black and white designations, they aren’t direct send-ups of any particular country or regime. They’re both treacherous and stupid, because the two of them being on the same level better develops the metaphor and subverts the classic Tom/Jerry, Elmer/Bugs, Coyote/Roadrunner dynamic. (Prohías and the editors went so far as to “keep score” of who won and lost in every strip so neither would ever pull ahead.) There’s no overarching plot or story, including even the most basic details of the strip’s presumed “wartime” setting, and whatever lore can be said to exist is thin and deliberately vague.

Spy vs. Spy is truly timeless in a way few things are: while the strip often obsesses over the minutiae of its goofy gadgets, the tech is appropriately farcical, never feeling bogged down in time or place. The whole thing feels as contemporary in the 2020s as it did in the 1960s. The spies can be chasing each other in embassy offices and military bases, sure, but they can also be at sea, in space, walking down the street, chilling at home, engaging in trench warfare, cozy in bed. They can be pilots and cowboys and mad scientists, can be aristocrats and jailbirds and lazy beachgoers. The strip is also a prime example of all-ages content that actually works. The appeal of these original strips isn’t based on watering itself down for the tykes or shoehorning in dirty jokes for the adults, but rather the kind of dynamic storytelling that can be appreciated in pretty much the same way by everyone, regardless of age or perspective. 

This flexibility extends beyond the surface-level setup: it’s the idea at the core of the metaphor, and thus at the core of the strip’s wacky mechanics. The typical structure of a Spy vs. Spy strip involves Spy A noticing Spy B’s plan of attack, Spy A developing a counterattack, only for Spy B to have planned for this new plan, revealing the original scheme as a ruse designed to foil Spy A’s predictable response. They aren’t just similar, alike and in constant conflict, but literally identical, twisted inversions of each other that remain one and the same. In my favorite of Prohías’ original strips, both spies decide to paint themselves the same color as their enemy in order to infiltrate the other’s operation. When they meet each other on a street corner, they’re faced only with their own unholy doppelgänger. The last panel shows the spies side by side in therapy, panicked and unsure of who they really are. 

It’s not just that their plans only make sense if each knows what the other is going to do at all times because ha ha recognizable cartoon logic—it’s that it only makes sense if each knows what the other is going to do at all times because oh shit, that’s the recognizable self-fulfilling logic of political coercion. All the elaborate Rube Goldberg-style explosions are an extension of the strip’s central conceit of war and espionage not just as inherently flawed concepts, but inherently flawed subjects of entire interconnected systems of people and places that profit (whether in money or mythmaking or both) from the petty skirmishes of fiendishly devoted underlings. Hollow victories for hollow ideologies. To paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, the stupidity is the message. 

The spies in Spy vs. Spy are patriots without countries, cursed forever to play out the violent gestures of war without any of the context that distracts from (or justifies) the carnage. In a 2020 Instagram Story, writer Ocean Vuong highlighted two other key components of a good metaphor—namely, that the tenor and vehicle of a metaphorical comparison should have both a sensory connection and a logical/emotional connection. In this way, Spy vs. Spy shows us that war is its own perfect reflection, bombs and guns and missiles as both the tactile and logical endpoint of a country’s self-image, death as the only way to define a nation. It’s not an accident that all the TOP SECRET intel the spies try to steal from each other are blueprints for more weapons. 

You might say I’m thinking way too hard about this. Black Spy once fed gunpowder to a chicken and White Spy’s house blew up when he tried to make breakfast with the egg it laid, chill out. But it’s worth noting that Prohías’ work was always thoroughly researched despite its simplicity: in Cuba, on top of devouring newspapers and radio broadcasts everyday to stay up-to-date on current events, he maintained contacts at the American embassy who gave him info about various political dealings. He kept archives on many figures, including Castro, in order to weave what he learned into his comics. The message of his work was never just “war bad.” Sergio Aragonés, a fellow Spanish-speaking cartoonist and one of his closest friends at MAD, says that Prohías would read entire books about specific military operations to get ideas for Spy vs. Spy, refining them and refining them until they “would arrive at a sublime simplification.” Aragonés also notes that Prohías would regularly present “a half dozen” strips for “every one the editors accepted,” strips he says were “equally researched” and “equally good.” “Presenting” these strips involved Prohías drawing highly detailed 8.5-x-11-inch sketches that, barring ink, were basically finished, ensuring his ideas would come across to the editors without use of his limited English. Once he got the go-ahead, he’d redraw the entire strip in MAD’s extra large 13.5-x-18.25-inch format before inking it. Prohías’ process was thoughtful and rigorous, is what I’m saying. The simple, unpretentious presentation belied all the intricate work that went into its development. 

The central metaphor wouldn’t work if the mechanics of the comics itself weren’t up to par. Luckily, the strips are engaging as hell: frenetic yet fluid, complicated without being overly complex, punchy and relatively easy to follow while also rewarding multiple close reads. It’s amazing how much detail is in these original strips, the way lines vary in thickness to add dimension to even the simplest objects, how much the designs of the batshit weaponry are steeped in plausible engineering consistent enough to foreshadow twists for particularly keen readers. As involved as the spies’ schemes got, the strips always maintained a level of sparseness: the comics never have more than eight panels, and oftentimes the stand-alone title gags that begin the strips’ section (the so-called “Joke and Dagger Dept.”) are more complex than the strips themselves. Prohías knew exactly what to include in every panel to convey all the proper information to keep the reader on their toes. And to do this all with no dialogue, virtually no words save for the occasional label or sound effect? Unreal.

What his work reminds me of the most, weirdly enough, is certain examples of post-punk manga. Katsuhiro Otomo of Akira fame, Taiyō Matsumoto’s Tekkonkinkreet, even dudes like Junji Ito or Tite Kubo. Vastly different tones, cultures, and genre expectations aside, they all deal in masterful, hyper-detailed black and white art that remains next to impossible to replicate or adapt in a one-to-one capacity. This is why the various animated adaptations of Spy vs. Spy are so disappointing. The detailed staging of Prohías’ work is perfect for telling his stories in four to eight “frames,” but having to render the moments between panels only highlights how flat the rest of the short is by comparison. It might only take 30 seconds to diligently read any given strip, but seeing that same strip play out in 30 seconds of real time feels unnatural. 

Shockingly, my preferred adaptation is a Mountain Dew TV ad campaign that ran in 2004. As depressing as the whole enterprise is, the fact that the five shorts are live action, the fact that they combine 2D facial animation and practical effects, forces the creators to completely restructure the ideas behind Prohías’ strips. They shot a black and white set in color, and the spies were played by talented performers, one of which was a former Cirque du Soleil member. They move with exaggerated conspiratorial energy, speaking dubbed-in French gibberish as they navigate a vacant, not-quite-cartoon world. Throw in the clanking quasi-industrial soundtrack, the obvious soda cameos, and the fact that the editors would pull frames from the footage to lend a heightened jerkiness to the actors’ movements, and the effect is surreal and fascinating, lighthearted but also dark and vaguely sinister. It captures the spirit of Prohías’ work while also doing its own thing.

Prohías wrote and drew 241 installments of Spy vs. Spy over the span of 26 years. In 1987, with his health declining due to emphysema, he retired from the strip. His family, his children and their children, lived in Miami; he started visiting more and more often until, one day, he simply never returned to New York. Though he and the mother of his children had gotten divorced in the early ’60s, daughter Marta says that “they became good friends and it was she who cared for him the last ten years of his life.” Prohías died on February 24, 1998. 

For a decade after Prohías retired, the strip was taken up by a slew of artists and writers, most notably Don “Duck” Edwing and David Manak—a move Prohías was enthusiastic about, even initially offering feedback on the new comics. And yet, his absence is felt: this period of Spy vs. Spy is middling at best. Manak is a great artist; he would go on to do the pencils for a big chunk of Archie Comics’ Sonic The Hedgehog series in the ’90s, becoming, to a certain generation, yet another unsung comics legend. While his style was much looser and rougher than Prohías’, achieving a kind of hectic complexity that feels like a kid doodling in the compact margins of their school worksheets, Edwing’s concepts were often much more straightforward and boring than past strips. No one could ever really emulate the breezy, clever reversals that had become Prohías’ signature (though one strip involving a Bride of Frankenstein knockoff whose huge cartoon boobs turn out to be bombs is pretty inspired). 

In April 1997, Peter Kuper took over the strip to coincide with MAD’s “edgy” rebranding. He worked primarily in layered, spray-painted scenes, drawing out the blocky comics before using an X-ACTO knife to turn them into stencils. We’re back in “anything goes” territory, so the spies appear as old men and tennis players and Roman chariot racers, babies and cavemen and the subject of Hollywood movies. There’s even one strip revolving around White Spy drawing Spy vs. Spy strips. There’s some fun to be had, but Kuper’s work, visually dynamic as it is, relies on a methodical art style that doesn’t really mesh well with the strip’s fast pace. And although they’re ultimately aesthetic nitpicks, I never liked how gory the deaths are in Kuper’s comics, nor how the strips transitioned to being in color. In practice, both these moves wind up feeling antithetical to what makes Spy vs. Spy so interesting: seeing eyeballs and bloody brain matter after one of the now-Caucasian spies gets cut in half by an elevator door makes the whole thing feel wrong. 

Later, a few ill-fated spin offs in the early aughts proved that editors and audiences alike had lost track of what made Prohías’ original work so incredible, focusing instead on marketable aesthetics and surface-level narrative. There was Spy vs. Spy Jr., featured in the short-lived publication MAD Kids, a segment that failed to realize that making the spies prank-obsessed grade schoolers was pointless because Spy vs. Spy is already the kid-friendly version of itself, a convenient microcosm of the backward logic that doomed the whole magazine. There was also the Spy vs. Spy Sunday newspaper strip, the apotheosis of Edwing and Manak’s take on the property and a fitting full-circle moment for Prohías’ artistic legacy. It was decent, all things considered, though it was pulled after 39 strips; in 2002, papers got skittish about military violence in the comics section. Already enough on the front page, I suppose.

To highlight the deeper realities of Spy vs. Spy is to mourn not just Prohías’ passing, but the eventual transformation of his creations into marketable grist for the isolating machinery of branded IP. This is what mega-success often looks like within the world of comics: something reaches such a ubiquitous level of notoriety that the “graphic” and the “narrative” become all but divorced. Combine that with the usual death throes of late capitalism, along with technologically sophisticated ways of cutting the artist out of the art-making process, and it becomes obvious why American entertainment has become so steeped in comics and comic book culture while the traditional, single-issue print periodical side of the comic industry is only becoming more and more niche. If an image is the idea of an idea, then a franchise is that second idea in perpetuity, because the image is the thing you can sand down and actually sell. You can’t profit off of history unless you rewrite it. 

All of which is to say that Spy vs. Spy is only part of the larger picture. What I’m lamenting isn’t just what became of Prohías and his work, but what became of the entire ecosystem that allowed him and his work to thrive the way it once did. As much of an undeniable institution as it is, MAD hasn’t been culturally relevant since MAD TV. How many years ago was that? The magazine itself transitioned to being a subscription-based collection of reprints, a move that’s as inevitable as it is disappointing. As for Spy vs. Spy itself, what original work Kuper does no longer incorporates his signature spray-paint style, making everything feel that much more flat and obvious. In addition, many of Prohías’ strips have been reprinted in color, a move that has all the urgent necessity of reprinting Beloved in Comic Sans.

And this is all before you get to the real brass tacks: the fact that MAD was first published in 1952, over 70 years ago, and virtually everyone involved with it during the era that made it a cultural force to begin with (save for, at time of writing, Aragonés) has since passed. William Gaines is dead. Harvey Kurtzman is dead. Al Feldstein is dead. Al Jaffee is dead. Wally Wood is dead. Will Elder is Dead. Jack Davis is dead. John Severin is dead. Don Martin is dead. Frank Jacobs is dead. Mort Drucker is dead. Dave Berg is dead. Nick Meglin is dead. Duck Edwing is dead. Antonio Prohías is dead. This isn’t so much a retrospective as it is a kind of elegy. 

Though I’m too young to be part of the generation of comic readers who received MAD magazine in its heyday as a revelation, brought into the know as I was by Cartoon Network’s 2010 Robot-Chicken-but-even-more-for-kids-with-the-not-at-all-confusing-title MAD and a particularly dorky father, it can become difficult to convince myself that anyone actually cares. Most of the info that’s publicly available regarding Prohías and his work is contained in two books, Spy vs. Spy: The Complete Casebook and Spy vs. Spy 2: The Joke and Dagger Files, omnibus volumes that collect Prohías’ original run and a sizable chunk of the interstitial strips respectively. 

The comics are all well preserved, as is all the behind-the-scenes production info, but the collections themselves are startlingly haphazard. Though released some years apart, they both feel like they were thrown together in a weekend, compelled not to restore Prohías to “the folk hero status he so justly deserves,” as the first book’s intro claims, but to take advantage of the timing of the aforementioned “edgy” relaunch. It’s everywhere you look, this weird, half-assed disconnect. J.J. Abrams of all people wrote the forward for the second book, a piece that’s about the same length as his bio in which he hand-wrings about being a braggart before bragging about owning the original artwork of the first Spy vs. Spy strip. The first book doesn’t even have a table of contents, despite having several essays sprinkled throughout to break up the comics. The pieces that aren’t written by Aragonés or Prohías’ daughter contain little emotional weight. They all read like everyone was told their piece would be the introduction, so the same stories and information get shared and re-shared over and over. In the second book, Kuper seems bent on revealing how little he considers the strip’s larger concepts, like when he says that a joke idea for a strip involves Black Spy being “forced to close his military industrial complex” as if it’s a car door or a pizza place at the local mall. Outside of the comics themselves, both books feel lifeless, propped up, almost vaguely disrespectful. In the first book’s acknowledgments, editor Charles Kochman reveals that the collection’s cover was “cobbled together from bits and pieces of Prohías’ panels — a hand from one page, a bomb from another.”

The collections and their lackluster historical perspective highlight the dark irony of Prohías’ success, the way the idea of an idea can come to grow well beyond intimate, personal context in which the original work is created. A 1983 interview with Prohías in The Miami Herald contains what is probably the most well-known quote about the originals of Spy vs. Spy: “The sweetest revenge has been turning Fidel’s accusation of me as a spy into a money making venture.”

In one of Kuper’s strips, White Spy can’t sleep. He’s haunted by nightmares of Black Spy stabbing him in the back. He visits a psychiatrist, an obvious Freud stand-in, and explains everything, at which point the psychiatrist explains the various facets of his dream: the knife represents his dysfunctional parents: the door both spies come out of represents repressed sexuality: Black Spy is his inner child’s alter ego: and the city itself represents social, religious, and economic stress. White Spy is healed! Trauma fully processed, he’s giddy and vibrant as he disposes of his bombs and his guns and his grenades, Freud looking on, approval hovering on the edges of his bearded lips. White Spy shakes his hand and leaves the office, whistling and—perhaps for the first time—filled with hope. Freud then takes off his face, revealing himself to be Black Spy in disguise. He stabs White Spy in the back. 

I guess some things never change.

Gyasi Hall is a writer and critic from Columbus, Ohio. Their essays “Alas, Poor Fhoul” and “Eminem Drop-Kicked Me in This Dream I Had” were both nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and their debut poetry chapbook, Flight of the Mothman: An Autobiography, was published by The Operating System in Spring 2019. Their work can be found or is forthcoming in Guernica, Lit Hub, The Iowa Review, and The Black Warrior Review, among others. They received their MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Iowa, and they are currently working on a book about Black people and comics.

Editor: Peter Rubin

Fact-checker: Leigh Kunkel

Copyeditor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

But let us find the trouble now. All through Vermeer’s oeuvre are objects like those in “Woman in Blue Reading a Letter” that remind us the world is large. This was the world that was emerging after the protracted struggle by the Netherlands for independence from Spanish rule. During the 80-Years war and in its immediate aftermath, the Dutch established trading posts in Asia, Africa and in the Americas. An efflorescence of capitalism at home and overseas followed, and with it the beginnings of a colonial empire. Their own experience of subjugation did nothing to temper their desire to subjugate others. The Dutch East India Company dominated maritime routes and its shareholders raked in profits. The Dutch West India Company, meanwhile, was a significant force in the trade in enslaved people. Ordinary Dutch citizens grew wealthy from these criminal enterprises. With a renewed sense of who they were in the world, they filled their homes with rare objects and far-fetched finery. You could have luxurious things, and you could also have them depicted in paintings. The paintings were helpful reminders that you were mortal, yes, but also that you were rich.

In his perceptive book “Vermeer’s Hat” (2008), the historian Timothy Brook draws out some of the global provenances of the things we see in Vermeer’s paintings. He suggests, for instance, that the silver on the table in the “Woman Holding a Balance” could have had its origin in the notorious Potosí silver mine, a hellish place run on the labor of enslaved people in what was then Peru and is now Bolivia. The felt lining the hat of the soldier in “Officer and Laughing Girl” almost certainly came from beaver pelts sourced by French adventurers from the violent trade networks of 17th-century Canada. Brook traces a connection between this lighthearted genre scene and the bitter history of the “starvation winter of 1649-50,” when European greed for pelts led to expulsions, wars and the mass deaths of Huron Indian children.

It’s hard to look back on nearly a decade and a half of posting without feeling something like regret. Not regret that I’ve harmed my reputation with countless people who don’t know me, and some who do — though there is that. Not regret that I’ve experienced all the psychic damage described herein — though there is that too. And not even regret that I could have been doing something more productive with my time — of course there’s that, but whatever. What’s disconcerting is how easy it was to pass all the hours this way. The world just sort of falls away when you’re looking at the feed. For all the time I spent, I didn’t even really put that much into it.

Susan Sontag elicits reactions. Her provocative essays sparked interest with their genre-remaking form and sweeping claims about 20th-century American culture. In Against Interpretation and Other Essays, for example, her eponymous essay aims to change how we experience art. Rather than intellectualize, we should embody — “in place of a hermeneutics, we need an erotics of art,” reads its killer line. A woman of endless creative energy (she did not like people to know she slept), in addition to writing essays, she was a film director, activist, and authored fiction. The conversations prompted by her art fiercely propelled her reputation. But it was never just about the work itself, for Sontag’s persona extends far beyond her person. As she shifted our concepts of illness, photography, and visual media, she infected the public with a larger-than-life presence. Her looks, attitude, and mind became a symbol of the “intellectual.” It sufficed for a recognizable Saturday Night Live impression for Julia Sweeney to simply have Sontag’s signature white streak in front of otherwise thick black hair. A white streak — to convey all that Sontag was!

Although a towering thinker, Sontag has always felt accessible to me through her work. I found her as a high schooler on a late fall evening; among the shelves of a colossal Barnes & Noble, Sigrid Nunez’s Sempre Susan caught my eye. The details of my discovery are hazy, but the intensity of its influence persists. At the time, I was just beginning to realize my queerness and consequently at a confused crisis point: The task of rebuilding my sense of self felt overwhelming amidst my new sudden and urgent questions. I was scrambling. Meandering. And suddenly, there was Sontag. Who was she? This beacon of energy, ideas, opinions. A model to propel my imagination. “Inspiration” feels kitschy (she would agree). A stabilizing force around which I could orient.

The pieces in this reading list attest to a similarly personal relationship the writers developed with Sontag. Whether known in real life, or just through her work, she manifests powerfully in individual psyches. Like me, the writers experienced Sontag as a teacher and mentor figure. But the pieces are just as divergent as she was multi-layered. As such, they produce strikingly unique accounts of her impact.

Being a memoir, Nunez’s Sempre Susan was a fitting introduction for me because I connect with writers as people first. The book recounts Nunez’s relationship with Sontag as her mentee, and, for a time, the girlfriend of Sontag’s son, David Rieff. It is vivid in its account, illustrating Sontag in full and taking care to highlight her quirks — her vocabulary habits (“boring, like servile, was one of her favorite words. Another was exemplary. Also, serious.”); her hatred of “art selfishness” (it gave her the utmost glee to share her passions with others); her insatiable desire for socialization and artistic pleasures. (She had a steady stream of houseguests, hated being alone, and was constantly attending film screenings, shows, etc.)

Further, Nunez’s portrait succeeds, where others fail, in representing Sontag’s complexities without reducing her to conclusions. Nunez, for example, documents Sontag’s wittiness — a side that is unfortunately lacking from many other such works. For a woman in the male-dominated field of criticism, respect was not a given. But Sontag’s demand for seriousness has often been overblown, her reputation making her out to be humorless. Nunez attests to a different Sontag; the one-liners speak for themselves. Nunez writes that once, when Sontag was “struggling to finish an essay, angry that we weren’t being supportive enough, she said, ‘if you won’t do it for me, at least do it for western culture.’” Or: In discussing an ex-lover, Sontag “declared that there was only one reason this woman continued to make her suffer each time Susan saw her. ‘If she went around wearing a paper bag over her head, I’d be just fine.’” A hilarious genius was materializing. I needed more.

It’s now been years since that fortuitous trip to Barnes & Noble, but my interest has not waned. Studying her feels like speaking with a childhood friend — even after I have a good sense of her (after all, we’ve spent so much time together), I am struck by something new. And that newness is especially delightful because it readjusts me to her, but softly, within expectations; a friend whose familiarity feels comforting as she grows and changes with each encounter. Reading her short story “Pilgrimage,” for example, endeared me to her sensitive side. The story, though not outright memoir (she was famously “anti-autobiographical”) is based on her teenage encounter with her writer hero, Thomas Mann. The protagonist is an information-greedy girl who keeps lists in her diaries, discusses Stravinsky with her friends on the regular, and yearns to venture past the bounds of her family life. Her meeting with Mann is not what she pictures. She is embarrassed throughout their conversation and frustrated that he does not speak to her like an adult. The encounter disillusions her to the fantasy she had built after feeling transformed by his book. Would meeting Sontag in real life have done the same to me? I like to think some fantasies are better left unbroken.

“Pilgrimage” is a touching portrayal to read in parallel to the struggling, hard on herself, yet always determined girl in the diaries. For the protagonist comes across so earnest, the adult Sontag handling her younger self with such love. A lesson in reconciling a childhood through fiction, of trying to make herself known within the protection of a story. In fact, all her work — the essays, the fiction, the interviews, the plays, the films, the relationships — speak to her experiments in shaping herself and her mind. Through her, others get to do the same; the writers in this reading list convey Sontag’s importance to their development. In each, I see some of my own connection to Sontag, and hope you find points of relation as well. It’s the thrill of: Me too! The sharing of passions Sontag so enjoyed. But ultimately, our connections with Sontag are personal: For your Sontag won’t be mine.

***

Desperately Seeking Sontag (Terry Castle, London Review of Books, March 2005)

Terry Castle recounts with humor, and alluring detail, her dynamic with Sontag. As she puts it, their relationship was “rather like the one between Dame Edna and her feeble sidekick Madge — or possibly Stalin and Malenkov. Sontag was the Supremo and I the obsequious gofer.” At the time she and Sontag met, Castle was beginning her academic literary career at Stanford, where she teaches to this day. Sontag was already a known entity and Castle fangirled, hard. Their first few encounters were intoxicating, as meeting an idol ought to be, Castle all awe and nerves as she tries to keep up. But over time, their dynamic turned sour, and they lost touch (or, as Castle puts it more bluntly, Sontag lost interest). Regardless of this turn of events, Castle does not turn to derision. What makes the piece stand out is how acutely Castle’s mixed feelings come through. In cultural memory, Castle notes, Sontag’s vivid personality is still missing from the spotlight. With Castle’s short but carefully specific narration, Sontag gets a little more color.

Things proceeded swiftly in our honeymoon phase. Sontag, it turned out, was coming to Stanford for a writer-in-residence stint that spring and the first morning after her arrival abruptly summoned me to take her out to breakfast. The alacrity with which I drove the forty miles down from San Francisco – trying not to get flustered but panting a bit at the wheel nonetheless – set the pattern of our days. We made the first of several madcap car trips around Palo Alto and the Stanford foothills. While I drove, often somewhat erratically, she would alternate between loud complaints – about her faculty club accommodation, the bad food at the Humanities Center, the ‘dreariness’ of my Stanford colleagues (‘Terry, don’t you loathe academics as much as I do? How can you abide it?’) – and her Considered Views on Everything (‘Yes, Terry, I do know all the lesser-known Handel operas. I told Andrew Porter he was right – they are the greatest of musical masterpieces’). I was rapt, like a hysterical spinster on her first visit to Bayreuth. Schwärmerei time for T-Ball.

“Camp is a Sensibility.” On Susan Sontag, Extravagance, and Sexuality (Amelia Abraham, Lit Hub, June 2021)

Queer people often have the experience as children of seeing parts of themselves reflected in others, without knowing that this is what they are seeing. We have a name for it — a “ring of keys” moment — taken from Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel Fun Home (which has been made into a fabulous musical). Like Bechdel, who as a child is struck with recognition and kinship upon seeing a butch mail carrier, journalist Amelia Abraham recounts how as a child she unconsciously sought representations of camp sensibilities in popular culture. She describes the cultural touchstones, like the aunts in Sabrina the Teenage Witch or the “Homer’s Phobia” episode of The Simpsons, that reflected and embraced her seemingly unconventional preferences. When she finally had a name and language for those tastes upon finding Sontag’s essay “Notes on Camp,” she saw in Sontag a “queer hero.” As Abraham elaborates, Sontag’s relationship with her queerness is complicated. She only outed herself later in life and was reticent to speak about her personal relationships. The well-documented fight between Sontag’s prolific outer world and her tightly-concealed inner world, a tension whose boundaries are impossible to delineate, helped Abraham sort through questions about motives in her own writing career. Returning to different parts of Sontag’s oeuvre as her own life evolves, Abraham sees Sontag as an enduring mentor figure.

Reading Sontag’s essay as a 19-year-old, and one who was grappling with my sexuality, something seemed to slip into place. “Notes on ‘Camp’” not only helped me to grasp the meaning of camp or to explain a lot of my weird cultural tastes, but it gave me something extra. Just months after confronting all of the difficult feelings that came with sleeping with a girl for the first time, in camp, I felt like I had inherited a special gift, a secret language, a very particular kind of humor. Camp felt like a weapon to use against the world when I might find myself up against homophobia—a source of joy in difficult times. But on top of that, I had gained something else. In Sontag, I had found a new queer hero.

Perspicuous Consumption (Wayne Koestenbaum, Artforum, March 2005)

Wayne Koestenbaum parades his eternal devotion to Sontag in this commemoration. A critic himself, Koestenbaum attends to Sontag’s special ways of writing — her detached tone, her outspokenness, her sharp conclusions — to reflect his education through her. “Susan Sontag, my prose’s prime mover, ate the world,” he begins. And consume, she did. But apparently, so did Koestenbaum. He draws quotes from across her essays and fiction, taking care to comment on the parts that intrigue him, stir him, “entrance” him. His expansive language speaks for itself; my words here cannot do him justice. But I will leave you with one more taste for his zeal: Koestenbaum not only thinks, but moreover dreams, in Sontag.

Sontag was a shameless apologist for aesthetic pleasure. Accordingly, I revere her essays not only for what they say but for how they say it. The essay, in Sontag’s hands, became perilously interesting, governed by caprice masquerading as commentary. Her capriciousness, like foppish fiction-maverick Ronald Firbank’s, turned on the dime of the sentence, that unit of fidelity to the “now,” to contemporaneous duration. Sentence maven, she enmeshes me still: In her prose’s hands I’m a prisoner of desire, yearning for a literary art that knows no distinction between captive and captor. Such art can be sadomasochistic in its charm, its coldness, and its vulnerability.

Reading the Margins: On Illness as Metaphor (Tessa Fontaine, FSG Work in Progress, November 2017)

Sontag has written loads about sickness, in essay collections like Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors, and short stories like “The Way We Live Now.” Further, she was herself a frequent patient. Throughout her three bouts of cancer, she maintained an intense will to live; her first diagnosis at age 40 was so dire she found only one doctor with any hope. Because of his radical treatment, live she did. Like Sontag, writer Tessa Fontaine was diagnosed young, at age 21. Though Fontaine did not find Illness as Metaphor until she was in remission, its arguments gave her community in cancer’s aftermath. Sontag elucidates the detriment of using metaphor to discuss disease. Invoking the language of warfare, like “invasive” and “survivor,” is commonplace when discussing cancer.

In these images, the body turns against itself, and the patient is both enemy and fighter. The imagery affected Fontaine’s experience — as a cancer patient, she developed a contentious relationship with her body. But she was able, through Sontag’s work, to process those contentions and see how they distort the disease into something that it is not. Fontaine’s copy of the essays, borrowed from the library, had the added charm of marginalia from a previous reader. Fontaine writes, “I felt as if I had joined a tiny collective. None of us knew each other. All of us were uncomfortable with the way we related to illness, and felt alone in our thinking. And yet that’s the lovely part. In the margins, we were not exactly alone.” In destigmatizing illness, Sontag provided necessary relief to people like Fontaine.

When I look back at my journal from when I had cancer, though, it’s clear that what scared me most was the new truth that my body could not be trusted. There had been a foreign invader, living right inside me. My body harbored secret, destructive agents. I was at war with myself—and because every metaphoric victor has its foil in its opposite, there was always the chance that somewhere within me there was the loser. I still have this secret, sneaking belief that deep in the center of most of my organs, there are massive, sticky, boiling lumps of tar. Or polyps filled with poison. Or a little army of diseases wearing armor and brandishing swords, ready to unleash.

If you believe that you are to blame for your illness, even in part, it is harder to survive, Sontag writes.

Susan Sontag Taught Me How to Think (A.O. Scott, The New York Times, October 2019)

If the pieces in this reading list invoke Sontag as a mentor and teacher, this one is the most on theme. Journalist and cultural critic A.O. Scott presents a composition, replete with numbered paragraphs — mirroring, one would be quick to note, Sontag’s own paragraph styling — about his life with Sontag. In only the confines of his mind, that is, as he turned down his one chance to meet her. He was captured at an early age. Her work made him eager for a head full of cultural knowledge like hers. But in this relationship of such character-defining importance, Scott is understandably protective. When narrating her legacy, he offers his frustrations: how she, a woman so adamant that images do not overtake content, has been moved from intellect to image. Scott resists his cravings to right this, deciding instead to paint a more personal version of Sontag. His struggle in deciding what Sontag to write, forthright to the reader, fills the piece with the hauntings of what he decides against. This doubled production, along with his embodied account of her importance, are a cup of tea to warm the heart of any Sontag devotee.

It’s hard for me, after so many years, to account for the impact “Against Interpretation” had on me. It was first published in 1966, the year of my birth, which struck me as terribly portentous. It brought news about books I hadn’t — hadn’t yet! — read and movies I hadn’t heard about and challenged pieties I had only begun to comprehend. It breathed the air of the ’60s, a momentous time I had unforgivably missed. But I kept reading “Against Interpretation” — following it with “Styles of Radical Will,” “On Photography” and “Under the Sign of Saturn,” books Sontag would later deprecate as “juvenilia” — for something else. For the style, you could say (she wrote an essay called “On Style”). For the voice, I guess, but that’s a tame, trite word. It was because I craved the drama of her ambivalence, the tenacity of her enthusiasm, the sting of her doubt. I read those books because I needed to be with her. Is it too much to say that I was in love with her? Who was she, anyway?

***

Brooke is a D.C.-based writer and keeps an arts, culture, and self-reflection blog Sometimes Trove.

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Sarah Haas | Longreads | October 2019 | 11 minutes (2,825 words)

In the days after reading Coventry, Rachel Cusk’s newest book and first collection of essays, I knew I’d been affected — deeply — but struggled to understand how. A binding together of pieces published between 2006 and 2019, it’s not clear whether Coventry was written with its final product in mind. Sure, the architecture seems intentional — as in it makes sense to read the collection from left to right — but without a central nor obvious thesis at its core, interpretation of the whole seemed to require an unfounded creativity. To make sense of Coventry I’d created a narrative that positioned the book against Cusk’s own storied life, imagining the collection as an allegory for the author’s experience of having been pummeled by so many critics. Reviewers of her other nonfiction works have called Cusk “condescending,” “terrible,” and cruel — an adjective that still sticks to her persona today. Wanting for narrative, I imbued Coventry with the arc, protagonists, and villains I’d imagined part of her life story. But then I heard Cusk’s voice like a whisper, proclaiming the death of exposition and character, as she did in a 2017 interview with The New Yorker. Cusk has been careful to ensure the absence of both in her work but, habituated to expect it, I’d struggled to yield. Just past the edge of my attention, my mind filled in the void by assigning Cusk the burden of the narrative’s enactment. It was the first time as a reader that I felt the success of a book depended not on the author’s ability, but on mine.

In Roland Barthes’ 1967 essay “The Death of the Author,” he writes of the difficulty of understanding a work without author as subject: “The Author, when believed in, is always conceived of as the past of his own book: book and author stand automatically on a single line divided into a before and an after. The author is thought to nourish the book, which is to say that he sits before it, thinks, suffers, lives for it, in the same relation of antecedence to his work as a father is to a child,” or in Cusk’s case, as a mother to two daughters.

This distinction between father and mother appeared of particular importance as I thought of Barthes’ quote, which was while I cleaned the dishes. Because my husband makes most of the money and I make very little we’ve come to an economic agreement, which is also a domestic one, that I will do most of the household chores. Some of them I hate to do, specifically folding laundry, but I enjoy doing the dishes — I like the ritual of mixing water and soap, the work of scrubbing remnants of food off plates, and the sense of progress made as the sink empties and the rack fills. When doing the dishes, I am at peace. But still the kitchen sink has been one of the most contentious places throughout my life and the dishes the number one topic of argument with my mom, then roommates, and now with my husband. Some believe that the person who dirties the dishes ought to clean them. Others think that the birth is also an act of labor and so relieves the cook of at least some of the responsibilities. But amid the debate, the fact of doing the chore is the only solution and when I’m elbow deep in water, who made the mess hardly seems important. This is how I wanted to be able to think of Coventry: as a book to be dealt with, on its own terms. But I struggled; the author kept turning up.

The book opens with “Driving As Metaphor” which begins: “Where I live, there is always someone driving slowly on the road ahead,” which I imagine is as common a cause for consternation as there is. The largely observational essay presents many familiar perspectives on driving — of how silly a traffic jam appears to walkers-by, of the marvel of the social contract on which driving depends, and of the two-sided privacy a car provides. The more generous aspects of driving (i.e., what it takes to “share” the road) shimmer beautifully in Cusk’s description, while other aspects seem newly contemptible, no matter that, like capitalism, the system depends on self-interest. In turn it reveals our ‘cruder prejudices’: “Women drivers, for instance, have been openly pilloried, and it is noticeable that even those who would not normally regard themselves as racist or xenophobic frequently describe driving in other places — Germany or Italy or the Middle East — in ways that draw upon or lampoon national characteristics.”

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The essay’s title is the only hint toward its interpretation, the narrative of the text otherwise made only of Cusk’s patented point of view — made only of what the author notices and chooses to write. And so it is that lack of narrative becomes the subject, and the essay a meta essay, as revealed in a moment when Cusk finds herself driving foreign roads in a rental car, immersed in an instance of defamiliarization: “On that wide, grey unfamiliar road, swept along in the narcotic tumult of speeding cars, every moment all at once seemed to contain the possibility of disaster, of killing or being killed. It was as if driving was a story I had suddenly stopped believing in, and without that belief I was being overwhelmed by the horror of reality.”

“Driving as Metaphor” is a tragic essay; Cusk ends with a story of coming across an accident near her home: a sports car overturned, its passengers lying beside it dead on the road, “their shocked faces as rigid as doll’s faces their summer clothes askew.” Yet the tragic quality does not lie in the obviousness of life lost, but in the subtlety of the lines that follow to conclude: “the accident had only just happened, but no one had seen it and there was no one there.” According to Barthes’ understanding of Greek tragedy (which he borrows from the French structuralist Jean-Pierre Vernant), the tragic tale will conclude in demise, but occurs in the absence of an observer who could correct the confusion at play. Whatever redemption can be found in a tragic narrative exists in the audience’s ability to act as witness, and it is the lack thereof which “Driving as Metaphor” upholds as its ultimate misfortune.

And so the following essay, “Coventry,” begins:

Every so often, for offenses actual or hypothetical, my mother and father stop speaking to me. There’s a funny phrase for this phenomenon in England: it’s called being sent to Coventry. I don’t know what the origins of the expression are, though I suppose I could easily find out. Coventry suffered badly in the war: it once had a beautiful cathedral that in 1940 was bombed into non-existence. Now it’s an ordinary town in the Midlands, and if it hasn’t made sense of its losses, it has at least survived them.

As the essay proceeds, the reader is uncertain of what truly happened in the real town of Coventry. Cusk will tell you more: that she has seen pictures of the original damage, and that she has been to the actual place to find that the cathedral was rebuilt by artists following the war. In a later essay she will explain the significance of art commingling with the divine: “The saint says, ‘I am nothing’; the artist says, ‘I am everything.’” (Barthes, again paraphrasing Vernant, also defines tragedy as “[a text] woven from words with double meanings that each character understands unilaterally.”) The destruction and rebuilding of Coventry begins to resemble Cusk’s own inner conflict, and is perhaps the reason she develops a kinship with her proverbial prison.

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But maybe a bit of history on Coventry would be helpful, too. A number of books have claimed that Prime Minister Winston Churchill knew Coventry was to be bombed by the Nazis, but chose to do nothing to defend it, protecting the intelligence of the Allies instead. The town and its people are said to have been sacrificed for the greater good. But this utilitarian version of history remains in the terrain of conspiracy; to date, no state official has confirmed or denied the story. You would think being “sent to Coventry” comes from this near-history of being ignored as the issuance of a kind of death, but the phrase is much older, dating to some earlier, hazier violence; perhaps the Coventry Act, which made the slitting of a man’s nose punishable by death: named not after the place but a man to whom that terrible thing happened. Cusk, however, remains detached from the centuries-long history, keeping her focus on the city as metaphor instead. As she wanders through the purgatory she inhabits when banished there by her parents, never with reason or explanation, she wonders not about what came before, but about what her present reality amounts to: “It was a test of an individual’s capacity for survival, of her own psychological strength: if other people pretend you’re not there, how long can you go on believing you exist?”

Perhaps this need for recognition has always been vital; Hegel first described it with the phrase ‘kampf um anerkennung’ in 1807’s The Phenomenology of Spirit. Seeking recognition might seem like an innocent search for confirmation, i.e., a subjective truth made to feel objective, but it’s also inextricable from power — a confusion Cusk confronts on intimate terms. In being ejected from her family’s narrative, Cusk was subjugated, too: an act of authorship in real time that Cusk cannot separate from violence: “War is a narrative: it might almost be said to embody the narrative principle itself. It is the attempt to create a story of life, to create agreement. In war there is no point of view; war is the end of point of view.”

Ultimately, Cusk decides to stay in Coventry; it is, in effect, a reclamation of her point of view. But still, hers is a harsh exit from her parent’s life, and one that forsakes reconciliation. Cusk’s choice is not just a personal one to end the story in order to start anew, but an authorial one that hints toward yet another death, the death of story at large. Rather than seeking the balm of amended relationships, “Coventry” enacts the alternative of individuality.

Writing in the midst of Brexit, an exemplar of our modern social confusion, Cusk stops fighting in order to yield to the fact of fundamental separateness. Which is not to say she has stopped wanting or believing in reunion — the most transcendental moment in “Coventry” comes when she’s walking alone, out of the woods, and toward the sea, describing “the feeling of clarity and expansion as though a word you’d been searching for has suddenly come back to you.” But if not reunification, evidence of progress exists in the relief Cusk feels in existing, even for a second, within the union of objective and subjective truths — no matter that it might get lonely out there on the edge.

But still Cusk exists as we all do, wondering about what to make of our social existence, and the book’s third essay, “On Rudeness,” opens with a moral rhetorical: “In a world unmannerly as this one, how is it best to speak?” In the next line we meet Cusk as one among many, in the security line at the airport, watching an employee directing travelers toward various cues. As Cusk nears him, she observes the man shouting at passengers and when she’s close enough she says, “there’s no need to be rude,” only to find that, as evidenced by both his retort and popular consensus, she is the one being rude.

“The social code remains unwritten, and it has always interested me how many problems this poses in the matter of ascertaining the truth. The truth often appears in the guise of a threat to the social code. It has this in common with rudeness.” She goes on to write of the sense of relief that so often accompanies both truth and rudeness, expressing a skepticism that can be taken as an indicator of either. Without ever mentioning her own embattlements with her critics, the essay portends toward what it’s been like to have been punished and disowned for her own truth-telling, and of the fundamental confusion she, and her country, endure. Written in 2016, Cusk considers Brexit as an allegory for narrative itself, wondering if it’s doomed toward irreconcilable differences, two different truths which, if tragic dramas are to serve as a guide, will surely result in violence, as if the domestic had been in reference to both personal and national borders all along.

But just then we’re asked to consider a different kind of border: Cusk inside a dressing room guarded by a store-attendant who refuses to stray from her script or to leave Cusk alone to try on her clothes. Cusk feels trapped. She wants to say:

I feel that people always have a choice where language is concerned, that the moral and relational basis of our existence depends on that principle. I wish to [tell the attendant] that there are those who have sacrificed themselves to defend it. If we stop speaking to each other as individuals, I want to say to her, if we allow language to become a tool of coercion, then we are lost.

Instead she says something short and rude. The attendant gets upset and leaves.

I wonder about this choice of language that Cusk offers up as a social fact because I’m not so sure the collective “we” really does have a choice. Do we live in a society that’s fair enough, and kind enough, to allow for that kind of freedom? But nevertheless I too grieve the loss of individuality that occurs when people either can’t or don’t stray from a script, whether as a part of a job or, under the guise of citizenship, of opinion. I think of Brexit’s Leavers and Remainders, I think of the Democrats and the Republicans, I think of all the arguments raging in our midst and I wonder what sustains them. Is it in each of us? Or is it between us and so somehow beyond us?

I’m wondering all this while I look out the window above the kitchen sink, doing the dishes that would never get done if the argument were all that mattered. I imagine all of the turmoil of our age like the landscape below which I know is full of movement, of life and death and all of the requisite dramas, but from where I stand it appears perfectly still. And when the dishes are done I wonder about progress: what does it require? I wonder if it is as Cusk had hinted, the word “sacrifice” ringing louder and louder in my mind like the church bells that sound every Sunday from the church that’s hidden in the forested valley below.

The final section of “On Rudeness” culminates in a section about Jesus Christ, the ultimate victim of opposing sides. Taking the question — What would Jesus do? — literally, Cusk considers his demeanor leading up to and during his crucifixion — a most brutal instance of progress. She notes that “he remained for the most part, polite.”

Even though Christ is meant to be used for such moral comparison and leadership, it’s awkward to watch as Cusk narrowly juxtaposes herself to the son of God and then adopts his demeanor as her new personal edict. It didn’t seem as much of a sacrifice as it did a form of betrayal. And it wasn’t until Cusk found her way forward through Christ that I realized how much I enjoyed her writing when she was still lost and a little rude, which is an oddly familiar tone, isn’t it? Sure, I understand why Cusk might want to live more mannerly, but I wonder about what this will do to Cusk, not as a character or as a person, but as an author. I worry that it could ensure Barthes’ promised death, not just the end of the story but of story itself. Then again, maybe the end isn’t meant to be regarded with fear, but rather as it is by Cusk in “Coventry” when she writes: “When what you’re used to is irretrievably gone, it’s hard to believe in something new … but the [people of Coventry] suspended their disbelief. The new things came to be, became reality. What needed to change was changed, just as the old things were destroyed — not by time, but by force of human will.”

* * *

Sarah Haas is a writer living in the mountains of New Mexico. Her writing has appeared in The Rumpus, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Paste, Westword, and more. 

Editor: Dana Snitzky

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Tobias Carroll | Longreads | July 2019 | 14 minutes (3,601 words)

Since the 2009 publication of her first novel O Fallen Angel, Kate Zambreno has had one of the most fascinating careers in American letters. Her work has included harrowing explorations of alienation (Green Girl) and evocative forays into literary and cultural history (Heroines). The year 2019 has brought with it two new books from Zambreno: Appendix Project: Talks and Essays, an addendum to Book of Mutter, her 2017 collection of writing on grief; and Screen Tests: Stories and Other Writing, which places a series of short autobiographical fictions in the same volume as several longer works of nonfiction, mainly art and literary criticism. The bifurcated structure of Screen Tests hints at something profound and disorienting about the not-so-clear dividing line between narrative and reality: many of the short fictions, or “screen tests” à la Andy Warhol, in the book’s first half feature real people — Zambreno herself, as well as writers and artists ranging from Amal Clooney to Susan Sontag. The screen tests grapple with their subjects’ work while addressing questions of identity and community and continuity; the critical essays in the book’s second half seem to echo themes that emerged in the screen tests. That the lines between fiction and nonfiction are blurred here is precisely the point.

Zambreno’s work offers readers an intellectually rigorous experience alongside the thrill of discovery. She has several other books in the works which will also explore fiction and nonfiction in equal measure. Her next novel, Drifts, will be released in 2020, and she’s working on a book about writer and photographer Hervé Guibert, To Write as if Already Dead. Zambreno talked with me earlier this month about Screen Tests, the challenges and pleasures of writing about visual art, reading the same books over and over again, and satirizing her own role as a “minor author.” The interview below has been edited for length and clarity.

*

Tobias Carroll: The structure of Screen Tests brings together a series of seemingly autobiographical short stories with a group of longer essays on a host of subjects. What inspired this choice?

Kate Zambreno: When putting the book together, I was rereading Borges’ Labyrinths. I like the way you read Labyrinths; you move from stories that read like strange essays, to the essays and reviews that still have a speculative feel to them. The book as a whole feels like a library of a particular mind. I am drawn to the idea of a collection, also of assemblage and collage. I think that was part of a drive of the writing of [Screen Tests], the sense of drift and accumulation.

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I thought about visual collections, too, like Nan Goldin’s slideshows of her friends, or Peter Hujar’s portraits of life and death.

I do think of the book as two distinct parts: there is the project of the screen tests, these digressive yet brief, sometimes very brief, pieces that were experiments in voice and form, and were written fairly recently over the course of a couple years; and then the longer essays, which were the only pieces of writing I finished for several years post-Heroines, which also encompassed my move to New York. With the screen tests, I was inspired especially by Thomas Bernhard’s Voice Imitator.

The essays, all written earlier, were mostly commissioned, in some way or another, sometimes just the invitation to write an essay, and I think I was trying to work through whether I could write discrete “essays,” what was an essay, my feelings of failure towards writing an essay. But what’s strange is within all of the longer essays I am thinking through some of the same figures as in the shorter screen tests. I struggled with whether I should chop up the essays and make them into screen tests, like cut them up for parts, or even whether I should just publish the collection with just the more recent pieces that I think have the distance of persona — the essays feel more directly intimate, more emotional. But if there’s anything I can say for sure about an essay, an essay is a document for attempting to think over a period of time,and I wanted to preserve the essays in the time period I wrote them in, these periods that were so fraught with doubt in terms of my relationship to writing.

There’s an allusion, both in this book’s title and in the stories themselves, to Andy Warhol’s screen tests. What are the challenges of evoking a visual art like that in prose?

In this recent period of writing fiction I’ve been inspired by visual forms. This probably began with my interest in the silence and slowness, the gauzy quality, of Barbara Loden’s Wanda; and then also the early ’70s trancey films of Chantal Akerman. I have been drawn to thinking of the still, or the long take, in terms of writing; and Warhol’s screen tests as these barely pulsating, breathing, stills — these performances of persona and names but also now, watching them, of anonymity and disappearance.

It started when I wrote “Susan Sontag,” which is the first one in the collection, which was really me playing with digression, the rhythm of the repetition of the name “Susan Sontag” that moved into this meditation on names, on fame and persona. I wrote “Susan Sontag” in the margins of a notebook, when I was supposed to be working on a novel, and remember thinking how fun and free it felt writing it, and wondering what it was. Was this really writing?

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The whole process of writing the screen tests was pretty playful; they felt like jokes, conceptually. I had this list of the titles I wanted to write — “Blanchot in a Supermarket Parking Lot,” or “Patty Hearst Wins the Westminster Dog Show,” or “Louise Brooks in a Mint-Green Housecoat” — and then finally wrote a lot of them last summer.

Oh, Louise Brooks’ collection of essays, Lulu in Hollywood, was a big inspiration as well, as was Shulamith Firestone’s Airless Spaces. I thought it was interesting that Warhol apparently filmed people for his screen tests he thought were going to be famous, or had some sort of star quality, but Shulamith Firestone writes portraits of the suicides she once knew, and Louise Brooks’ memoir is instead a series of vignettes about both the failures and then the really famous men she worked with.

What are some of the challenges that you’ve found in terms of writing about art from a fictional perspective?

I don’t know if I make a distinction between writing about art, when I write about it explicitly, in a space of fiction or a space that’s more of a talk or an essay. I think a model for me is the novelist Hervé Guibert, who was a photography critic and wrote about art constantly — so there’s his book on photography, Ghost Image, but also in his novel To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, he’s still thinking about painting, he’s thinking of his own drawing practice.

I think writing about art for me, in recent work, whether in the talks or the screen tests, or the novel that is coming out next year, is a way to also write about paying attention, about seeing. And also I long for writing to have the same permission of visual forms. In Screen Tests I’m especially interested in collage, like the playful collages of Ray Johnson and Sarah Charlesworth; I like the process and practice of a collage, as I write in “Pink Bunny Ears,” my Ray Johnson piece, and I thought of the screen tests like that, a daily collage I would send to a friend or famous person, like Johnson did. In my twinned Johnson and Charlesworth pieces there’s ekphrastic writing, about a specific collage — which is its own challenge, how language can conjure a work of art — but then the pieces drift and hopefully go to weird places.

Confronting and truly looking at a work of art can yield so much thinking and feeling, which is why in my novel Drifts, there are moments of encountering, say, Bouchra Khalili’s map project, or Sarah Charlesworth’s Stills, as well as thinking about Rilke being catalyzed by the fragmented sculptures of Rodin, but that’s also the experience of being in a city, and wandering into galleries and museums. And I think that’s why memories I write about are often saturated by experiencing art and being changed by it — like in an appendix essay remembering seeing Doris Salcedo’s “Atrabiliarios” while living in Akron, Ohio, her devastating alcoves of the found shoes of disappeared women in Colombia; or in a screen test, “On the Puppet Theater,” which goes from remembering Kleist’s strange essay “On the Puppet Theater,” to thinking about a former lover who was a puppeteer when looking at the puppets of Greer Lankton.

There is a challenge in writing about art in a commissioned way — like for a catalogue, like the Anne Collier essay, or an essay about Paula Rego I wrote for the catalogue for her UK retrospective that comes out this summer. It’s fun but daunting to be asked to spend a certain amount of time — sometimes many months, I’m slow when asked to do something like this — to consider an artist who I only encountered on a wall, at some time, and then to be expected to write an innovative essay about their work, so not as a critic, but as an essayist or novelist. And there’s the additional worry about writing as a form of promoting art as a commodity, or saying the things I’m expected to say, based on previous work, like expecting me to approach a work solely through a feminist lens — I find that boring. I always need to find a way for it to feel challenging for me. Actually, it’s the fact that I find writing about art challenging — I have no formal background in it — which may be why I’m drawn to it.

I like it when it feels like a collaboration. I loved composing the prose pieces B. Ingrid Olson commissioned me to write for her show at Albright-Knox with very open instructions for what was required. These were published in BOMB and appear in Screen Tests, but they were typeset by Olson and photographed as artworks included in the show. Part of the constraint of writing them was their visual dimensions, how they would look on the wall, and how she wanted them to somehow channel and introduce her work but not be explicit about it. They still took me forever to do. It’s a slow process for me, writing about art, because so much of the process is thinking and looking, and looking again, and again, and on another day, and struggling to find my own language for what I’m looking at. I like contemporary work especially like Ingrid Olson’s where when I first look at it I have no idea what I’m looking at, and it takes me a while to realize that slipperiness and opacity is the point — is it a self-portrait, how does it skew self-portraiture? I long for that in writing, that opacity and slipperiness.

Late in Screen Tests, you write, “this is not my self-portrait.” Earlier in the book, in the fictional half, there’s a long discussion of the nature of the use of “I” in certain works of fiction and nonfiction. What about this book made you want to explore questions of identity, narration, and veracity?

In recent work, I’m really interested in the “I” as a slippery space. I’m drawn to how Barthes confounds his earlier essay on the death of the author for his later playful and opaque works, like Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, thinking of the self as a site of multiplicity. I think some of the screen tests and later essays play with the absurdity of what has been an obsession of mine in this period of work I’m currently writing — the existential crisis of being a writer, and also being an author. That line from Emil Cioran: “One only perishes by the self that one assumes — to bear a name is to claim an exact mode of collapse.” I think in the screen tests there are various names collapsing, including my own. I love that sneaky move in a story, where the narrator’s sense of self begins to erode and become confounded, as does the question of authorship, that speculative or spooky feeling, like in “Borges and I,” or the stories of Kanai Mieko or Gerald Murnane or Sofia Samatar.

Screen Tests continues your ongoing project of writing about certain writers and works of art (Barbara Loden in particular comes to mind). Do you feel like someone reading Screen Tests on its own will read this differently from someone who had also read, say, Book of Mutter and Appendix Project?

I think there are certain artists and thinkers that repeat for me, because I keep on thinking through them. I feel right now like I won’t ever write about Barbara Loden and Wanda again. Like it’s enough! That marks a period of time for me across those three books. But Chantal Akerman — I’m still thinking about the films of Chantal Akerman, mourning Chantal Akerman, although now I’ve written about her in Appendix Project, in my novel Drifts, in a screen test. I’m still thinking about Ingeborg Bachmann. I’m still thinking about Barthes, about Wittgenstein. In fact inside of me there is a secret project where I finally write about the last two years of Barthes’s life, which I’m aware is absurd because that’s an important thread in Appendix Project, and where I’ll really write about Wittgenstein, also absurd, because I keep on writing anecdotes about Wittgenstein.

I like that movement in Screen Tests where a piece circling around the writing of an essay that very much resembles my essay on Barbara Loden’s Wandais at the front of the book, and then the actual essay is at the end. I think it’s funny and personally I enjoy it. Maybe this all has to do with failure. I keep on writing through the failure of writing. I desire to write about these certain writers and works of art in focused, elegant ways, and instead I drift, and I want to focus. I surprise myself with these returns, this refusal to let go.

I just finished a novel [Drifts] in which Rainer Maria Rilke writing Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge is important to the consciousness of the narrator, and I thought for sure, I’ll never write about Rilke again. I’m done with Rilke! I’m sick of Rilke! Rilke — no more. I’ve said everything I want about Rilke. But then the other day when I was in this spirit of boredom or play — like I want to write something that’s not something I’m supposed to be writing, I wanted to write a very compressed form, like a brief essay or poem, which was a lot of the impulse behind the screen tests — I just started researching something about Rilke at Duino. I wanted to write a short piece, about Rilke acting as the personal secretary during séances with Princess Marie Von Thurn und Taxis, maneuvering the planchette … I guess obsessions are private and involved, and I nurse them over a very long period of time, many years, across notebooks and books, and these artists and thinkers and writers become a sort of ghostly correspondence for me. And inspiration as to form.

A lot of my recent work has also been inspired by my friendship and correspondence with Sofia Samatar, and I think we feed each other’s obsession and intense, almost spastic, referentiality; it becomes a sort of private language, and we keep on writing each other into each other’s stories and essays … with Barthes, with Rilke, with Antoine Volodine, with Hervé Guibert, with Sebald, Kanai Mieko … Sofia appears in the screen tests but like everyone else, she’s disguised and fictionalized. For example I just realized today that we’ve been mentioning Bolano’s Antwerp to each other for several years, and so that bleeds into both of our texts — I just edited a page of my novel last week where I write about it, and then just read an in-progress piece of Sofia’s yesterday that mentions it. It’s funny, people sometimes ask me what I’m reading, and I always say something kind of helplessly boring like “I read the same books over and over.” Really right now when I can read for myself I just read Hervé Guibert. Or Bhanu Kapil, whose work I write about so much in the appendices. Or Sebald. Or Moyra Davey, whose work is also so obsessed by Guibert and Akerman.

I can’t really know what someone reading more than one of my books will think about their relationship to each other — I feel once I publish them, I want to eventually disappear as an author. It does become about a reader writing into the texts themselves, but I can’t know what that space is like. I do think that the screen tests are different in many ways, tonally, from the grief work, although there is a lot of grief in the longer essays. For one, I think the screen tests are a lot funnier and lighter. I think they are all different from Heroines, and certainly from the early novels, mostly because I feel I am a completely different person and thinker in every way — like cellularly. But of course there’s a commonality with Heroines. Especially in the essays. But the screen tests are also gossipy and petty, they are awash in the anecdotal, they are alienated and full of doubt yet somehow also in love with the possibilities of literature and community. I also feel very different from the person who wrote Book of Mutter as well, actually, and the longer essays. I feel closest to the writer who wrote the screen tests and the appendix talks because I think they have some control and innovation to them, and a quality of thinking and feeling directly, that feels closest to what I want out of writing now.

I disappear and transform, and then the work transforms; that’s how it goes. But I am still writing these books from the same body, with the same set of memories or past, even if they feel completely transformed. There’s something uncanny about that.

In a broader sense, what sort of a dialogue do you hope to create among your books? Is fictionalizing certain elements of your life in the stories in Screen Tests a way of complicating this?

I remember when I first moved here, I became friends with another novelist, we had different ideas about what we wanted out of fiction, and he kept on asking me, “Why are you always so meta?” Which I thought was pretty funny. He was probably referring to Green Girl, which got rejected from every agent for that same reason, that it was a book that was actually about a certain type of book or character, kind of like how Jean Seberg’s character in Breathlessis referring to her character in Bonjour Tristesse, which I write about in Screen Tests. And also there’s the fictional author creating the character of Ruth in Green Girl.

With Green Girl I read a lot of rejection letters warning me against the petty indulgences of metafiction; that’s what they called it. Who knew publishing was full of so many Calvino haters. I think that the narrators in recent work, including Screen Tests, and the series of books I’m working on — Drifts, To Write as if Already Dead, then two other novels that are sequels of a sort to Drifts: Ghosts and Switzerland— are suffering from what I might call the feminist hangover of how they are read post-Heroines and Green Girl, as well as thinking through a literary sickness, after Enrique Vila-Matas, and a literary sadness, wrestling with the larger question of how to be a writer in the contemporary, within capitalism and publishing, and the role of friendship and community within this. I think I’m interested in slightly satirizing the position of the minor author in society … all of this work in the years post-Heroines and since I moved to New York.

I love it when a work references past books; it’s like a little thrill for me. At the opening of Wittengstein’s Nephew, Thomas Bernhard’s narrator reviews a bound copy of Gargoyles [one of Bernhard’s early novels]; one of the nuns puts it on his bed in the hospital where he’s recovering from consumption, and he feels kind of alienated and disgusted by it. I love that this is also the experience for me of looking at a book that I apparently wrote that has been published, like — who wrote that?

I think that’s why I’m interested in thinking of new writing within the space of fiction — whether or not a publisher chooses to classify it as nonfiction — because I like that narrative space of the real, when you’re not sure what’s real and what’s not real. Danielle Dutton calls this near-fiction. There’s a suspense there, a defamiliarization. It’s an uncertain and slippery space; that’s what I like.

I really do think, that when one writes, one enters the space of fiction; you are writing I and also not-I. I like how [Robert] Walser viewed his fictions as chopped-up and dismembered books of himself. I think of the shorts in Screen Testsas a mini-catalogue, of my obsessions, of all the works that came before, in a way. The joy is in the compression.

* * *

Tobias Carroll is the managing editor of Vol.1 Brooklyn. He is the author of the books Reel and Transitory.

Editor: Dana Snitzky

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Soraya Roberts | Longreads | May 2019 | 9 minutes (2,309 words)

It’s a strange feeling being a cultural critic at this point in history. It’s like standing on the deck of the Titanic, feeling it sink into the sea, hearing the orchestra play as they go down — then reviewing the show. Yes, it feels that stupid. And useless. And beside the point. But what if, I don’t know, embedded in that review, is a dissection of class hierarchy, of the fact that the players are playing because what else are you supposed to do when you come from the bottom deck? And what if the people left behind with them are galvanized by this knowledge? And what if, I don’t know, one of them does something about it, like stowing away their kids on a rich person’s boat? And what if someone is saved who might otherwise not have been? If art can save your soul, can’t writing about it do something similar?

The climate report, that metaphorical iceberg, hit in October. You know, the one that said we will all be royally screwed by 2040 unless we reduce carbon emissions to nothing. And then came news story after news story, like a stream of crime scene photos — submerged villages, starving animals, bleached reefs — again and again, wave after wave. It all coalesced into the moment David Attenborough — the man famous for narrating documentaries on the wonders of nature — started narrating the earth’s destruction. I heard about that scene in Our Planet, the one where the walruses start falling off the cliffs because there is no ice left to support them, and I couldn’t bring myself to watch it. Just like I couldn’t bring myself to read about the whales failing to reproduce and the millions of people being displaced. As a human being I didn’t know what to do, and as a cultural critic I was just as lost. So when Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation launched “Covering Climate Change: A New Playbook for a 1.5-Degree World,” along with a piece on how to get newsrooms to prioritize the environment, I got excited. Here is the answer, I thought. Finally.

But there was no answer for critics. I had to come up with one myself.

* * *

Four years ago, William S. Smith, soon to be the editor of Art in America, attended the Minneapolis-based conference “Superscript: Arts Journalism and Criticism in a Digital Age” and noticed the same strange feeling I mentioned. “The rousing moments when it appeared that artists could be tasked with emergency management and that critics could take on vested interests were, however, offset by a weird — and I would say mistaken — indulgence of powerlessness,” he wrote, recalling one speaker describing “criticism as the ‘appendix’ of the art world; it could easily be removed without damaging the overall system.” According to CJR, arts criticism has been expiring at a faster rate than newspapers themselves (is that even possible?). And when your job is devalued so steadily by the industry, it’s hard not to internalize. In these precarious circumstances, exercising any power, let alone taking it on, starts to feel Herculean.

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Last week’s bloody battle — not that one — was only the latest reminder of critics’ growing insignificance. In response to several celebrities questioning their profession, beleaguered critics who might have proven they still matter by addressing larger, more urgent issues, instead made their critics’ point by making it all about themselves. First there was Saturday Night Live writer Michael Che denigrating Uproxx writer Steven Hyden on Instagram for critiquing Che’s Weekend Update partner Colin Jost. Then there was Lizzo tweeting that music reviewers should be “unemployed” after a mixed Pitchfork review. And finally, Ariana Grande calling out “all them blogs” after an E! host criticized Justin Bieber’s performance during her show. Various wounded critics responded in kind, complaining that people with so much more clout were using it to devalue them even more than they already have been. “It’s doubtful, for instance, that Lizzo or Grande would have received such blowback if they hadn’t invoked the specter of joblessness in a rapidly deteriorating industry,” wrote Alison Herman at The Ringer, adding, “They’re channeling a deeply troubling trend in how the public exaggerates media members’ power, just as that power — such as it is — has never been less secure.” 

That was the refrain of the weeklong collective wound-lick: “We’re just doing our jobs.” But it all came to a head when Olivia Munn attacked Go Fug Yourself, the fashion criti-comic blog she misconstrued as objectifying snark. “Red carpet fashion is a big business and an art form like any other, and as such there is room to critique it,” site owners Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan responded, while a number of other critics seized the moment to redefine their own jobs, invoking the anti-media stance of the current administration to convey the gravity of misinterpreting their real function, which they idealized beyond reproach. At Vanity Fair, chief critic Richard Lawson wrote of his ilk offering “a vital counterbalance in whatever kind of cultural discourse we’re still able to have.” The Ringer’s Herman added that criticism includes “advocacy and the provision of context in addition to straightforward pans,” while Caroline Framke at Variety simply said, “Real critics want to move a conversation forward.” Wow, it almost makes you want to be one.

I understand the impulse to lean into idolatry in order to underscore the importance of criticism. Though it dates back as far as art itself, the modern conception of the critic finds its roots in 18th-century Europe, in underground socially aware critiques of newly arrived public art. U.K. artist James Bridle summed up this modern approach at “Superscript,” when he argued that the job of art is “to disrupt and complicate” society, adding, “I don’t see how criticism can function without making the same level of demands and responding to the same challenges as art itself — in a form of solidarity, but also for its own survival.” Despite this unifying objective, it’s important to be honest about what in actual practice passes for criticism these days (and not only in light of the time wasted by critics defending themselves). A lot of it — a lot — kowtows to fandom. And not just within individual reviews, but in terms of what is covered; “criticism” has largely become a publicity-fueled shill of the most high-profile popular culture. The positivity is so pervasive that the odd evisceration of a Bret Easton Ellis novel, for instance, becomes cause for communal rejoicing. An element of much of this polarized approach is an auteur-style analysis that treats each subject like a hermetically sealed objet d’art that has little interaction with the world.

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The rare disruption these days tends to come from — you guessed it — writers of color, from K. Austin Collins turning a Green Book review into a meditation on the erasure of black history to Doreen St. Felix’s deconstruction of a National Geographic cover story into the erasure of a black future. This is criticism which does not just wrestle with the work, but also wrestles with the work within the world, parsing the way it reflects, feeds, fights — or none of the above — the various intersections of our circumstances. “For bold and original reviews that strove to put stage dramas within a real-world cultural context, particularly the shifting landscape of gender, sexuality and race,” the Pulitzer committee announced in awarding New Yorker theatre critic Hilton Als in 2017. A year later the prize for feature writing went to Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, the one freelancer among the nominated staffers, for a GQ feature on Dylann Roof. Profiling everyone from Dave Chappelle to Missy Elliott, Ghansah situates popular culture within the present, the past, the personal, the political — everywhere, really. And this is what the best cultural criticism does. It takes the art and everything around it, and it reckons with all of that together.

But the discourse around art has not often included climate change, barring work which specifically addresses it. Following recent movements that have awoken the general populace to various systemic inequities, we have been slowly shifting toward an awareness of how those inequities inform contemporary popular culture. This has manifested in criticism with varying levels of success, from clunky references to Trump to more considered analyses of how historic disparity is reflected in the stories that are currently told. And while there has been an expansion in representation in the arts as a result, the underlying reality of these systemic shifts is that they don’t fundamentally affect the bottom line of those in power. There is a social acceptability to these adaptations, one which does not ask the 1 Percent to confront its very existence, ending up subsumed under it instead. A more threatening prospect would be reconsidering climate change, which would also involve reconsidering the economy — and the people who benefit from it the most.  

We are increasingly viewing extreme wealth not as success but as inequity — Disney’s billion-dollar opening weekend with Avengers: Endgame was undercut not only by critics who questioned lauding a company that is cannibalizing the entertainment industry, but by Bernie Sanders: “What would be truly heroic is if Disney used its profits from Avengers to pay all of its workers a middle class wage, instead of paying its CEO Bob Iger $65.6 million — over 1,400 times as much as the average worker at Disney makes.” More pertinent, however, is how environmentally sustainable these increasingly elaborate productions are. I am referring to not only literal productions, involving sets and shoots, but everything that goes into making and distributing any kind of art. (That includes publicity — what do you think the carbon footprint of BTS is?) In 2006, a report conducted by UCLA found that the film and television industries contributed more to air pollution in the region than almost all five of the other sectors studied. “From the environmental impact estimates, greenhouse gas emissions are clearly an area where the motion picture industry can be considered a significant contributor,” it stated, concluding, “it is clear that very few people in the industry are actively engaged with greenhouse gas emission reduction, or even with discussions of the issue.”

The same way identity politics has taken root in the critic’s psyche, informing the writing we do, so too must climate change. Establishing a sort of cultural carbon footprint will perhaps encourage outlets not to waste time hiring fans to write outdated consumers reviews that do no traffic in Rotten Tomatoes times. Instead of distracting readers with generic takes, they might shift their focus to the specifics of, for instance, an environmental narrative, such as the one in the lame 2004 disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow, which has since proven itself to be (if nothing else) a useful illustration of how climate change can blow cold as well as hot. While Game of Thrones also claimed a climate-driven plot, one wonders whether, like the aforementioned Jake Gyllenhaal blockbuster, the production planted $200,000 worth of trees to offset the several thousand tons of carbon dioxide it emitted. If the planet is on our minds, perhaps we will also feature Greta Thunberg in glossy magazines instead of Bari Weiss or Kellyanne Conway. Last year, The New York Times’ chief film critic, A.O. Scott, who devoted an entire book to criticism, wrote, “No reader will agree with a critic all the time, and no critic requires obedience or assent from readers. What we do hope for is trust. We try to earn it through the quality of our writing and the clarity of our thought, and by telling the truth.” And the most salient truth of all right now is that there is no art if the world doesn’t exist.

* * *

I am aware that I’m on one of the upper decks of this sinking ship. I have a contract with Longreads, which puts me somewhere in the lower middle class (that may sound unimpressive, but writers have a low bar). Perhaps even better than that, I work for a publication for which page views are not the driving force, so I can write to importance rather than trends. I am aware, also, that a number of writers do not have this luxury, but misrepresenting themselves as the vanguards of criticism not only does them a disservice but also discredits the remaining thoughtful discourse around art. A number of critics, however, are positioned better than me. Yet they personalize the existential question into one that is merely about criticism when the real question is wider: It’s about criticism in the world.

I am not saying that climate change must be shoehorned into every article‚ though even a non sequitur would be better than nothing — but I am saying that just as identity politics is now a consideration when we write, our planet should be too. What I am asking for is simply a widening of perspective, besides economics, besides race, beyond all things human, toward a cultural carbon footprint, one which becomes part of the DNA of our critiques and determines what we choose to talk about and what we say when we do. After more than 60 years of doing virtually the same thing, even nonagenarian David Attenborough knew he had to change tacks; it wasn’t enough just to show the loss of natural beauty, he had to point out how it affects us directly. As he told the International Monetary Fund last month: “We are in terrible, terrible trouble and the longer we wait to do something about it the worse it is going to get.” In Our Planet, Attenborough reminds us over and over that our survival depends on the earth’s. For criticism to survive, it must remind us just as readily.

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

Matthew Kassel | Longreads | August 2018 | 14 minutes (3,488 words)

Jazz has changed a lot over the past 100 years or so of its existence, but it has never been as stylistically varied — or more packed with practitioners — as it is at the present moment. That’s a good thing for listeners, who now have many points of entry if they are new to the music and don’t necessarily want to start with a record that was cut 50 years ago. Mary Halvorson’s slashing guitar, for example, may appeal to more punk-minded listeners. The pianist Robert Glasper’s Dilla-esque grooves are a good gateway for hip-hop fans. And the tenor saxophonist Kamasi Washington’s sweeping, spiritual-minded albums are a potential attraction for jam band aficionados. There’s a lot going on.

And yet, at the same time, there are probably fewer people writing about modern developments in jazz than ever. While niche magazines like JazzTimes and DownBeat are still going strong, there is scant jazz coverage in mainstream music publications (which tend to treat jazz like a novelty item), and the New York Times no longer runs weekly live jazz reviews (a recent development). Nate Chinen was, in fact, the last person to review jazz shows on a regular basis there, a position he left in 2017 after a dozen years contributing to the paper. He is now the director of editorial content at WBGO, the Newark public radio station.

In his new book, Playing Changes: Jazz for the New Century, Chinen draws on his experiences as a former newspaper critic, attempting to make sense of what’s been going on in jazz over the past few decades. It isn’t an easy task, and he does a good job collating a whole lot of material, pulling on interesting threads and adding context for readers who may not be all that familiar with the reasons why Wynton Marsalis was — and still is, to an extent — a polarizing figure. Mostly, Chinen approaches jazz on its own terms. He describes what the music sounds like now and conveys to readers where modern jazz artists are coming from. In doing so he’s created a book that is truly of its time.

When we met at Café Loup in the West Village on a recent evening, I couldn’t help but think that a book like Chinen’s might be the last of its kind, given that there are so few opportunities for jazz critics to do their thing on a regular basis and to gain the kind of expertise that is so crucial to informed criticism of any kind. (No American newspaper, as far as I know — and I’ve asked around — currently employs a full-time jazz writer.)

But Chinen is optimistic. In our conversation, we discussed the state of jazz, the state of jazz writing and how those two things intersect, among other topics. Here are edited excerpts of the interview, condensed for clarity.

Matthew Kassel: How did you come to the idea for the book?

Nate Chinen: I’ve been writing about jazz for a little over 20 years, starting in the mid-90s, and to me, it’s a culmination of all of that. When I began to think about what a book about the state of the music in our time would be about, so much of my own experience observing the scene seemed germane to that conversation, because I think it was a really critical time. There was so much change in the air on so many levels.

The first chapter was a really helpful primer, I think, for anyone who wants to understand the issues that have been going on for the last 30 or 40 years in jazz.

At the very beginning of the process, there was an idea I had, which was that all of the big, important books about jazz really take measure of the 20th century, and often don’t do that great a job with the end of the 20th century; it’s kind of the Ken Burns Jazz problem, and some of that has to do with the terms of the argument. Jazz was effectively born at the beginning of the 20th century, and it had this kind of lifespan. And so if you are using that framework, then, yeah, you’re going to be most excited about what happened in the ’20s and what happened in the ’40s and the ’60s. And so I was interested in opening another side door and saying, “Well, what if this isn’t an arc of evolution that begins here and ends here, but a rolling thing?” The culture of jazz has shifted perceptibly during my time covering it. It’s much more permeable and permissive and dynamic and fluid. I think that’s a really exciting development. I’m a big proponent of that, and to me the conversation around jazz is more useful now than it was when I was first starting out.

Why do you think that is?

I don’t want to present you with a mess, but: from the moment that I began thinking about the book, I knew that I wanted to have a chapter that dealt with the idea of the new elders. Forever, there was this kind of north star idea of a jazz elder, and it was somebody who kept the torch burning and kept the tradition alive, and it was this very sort of small-c conservative idea of: we know what the jazz tradition is and the elders are the ones who know it best. But what happens when a new generation of elders is in power and these are people who did more than anyone to explode that? There’s so much evidence of it. I feel like that is a major shift, this idea that, “Oh, your elder is Herbie Hancock? Your elder is the guy who made ‘Rockit’?” That’s a profound change and it has implications all over the place.

People who read the paper in print are not trackable. They don’t generate pageviews. And so they’re invisible. And a pretty substantial portion of readers who turned to the Times for jazz and classical coverage were invisible.

Was that disorienting for you as a critic, when you started getting on to the notion that jazz was changing in front of you?

No. You know, Steve Coleman told me that so much depends on when you were born. He talks about Charlie Parker, for instance — this idea that people who were close contemporaries of Charlie Parker didn’t end up sounding like him because, even if they absorbed the ideas of bebop they didn’t sound like Bird; they were too close to him. But the people who were seven or eight or 10 years younger than Bird sounded just like him because they hadn’t formed themselves. So in a similar way, as a critic and as a listener, I’m the same age as Jason Moran basically — I’m 41 — I’m pretty much the same age as Vijay Iyer, I’m a little older than Esperanza Spalding, I’m older than Ambrose Akinmusire. But this is the generation that I feel closest to, right?

In your first chapter you get into this idea of the jazz savior narratives put forth by critics like Martin Williams, who wrote about Charles Lloyd for the Times in the ’70s, and now with Kamasi Washington. How much do you think the perception of jazz is shaped by the criticism of it?

I would like to think that criticism has a great influence on the perception of jazz, but I honestly don’t know the answer to that. I think that in the historical record, it matters a great deal, but it’s also different now, even in the last year or so. I used to be at the Times, and there was a presumption about what that meant. Martin Williams enjoyed a kind of institutional authority that has eroded completely. Gary Giddins had that at the Voice, too. You could sort of inhabit a perch and make your pronouncements. And for better and for worse, people don’t invest so much in that idea of authority anymore. Part of me feels like, “Good riddance,” because what that means is that every argument needs to stand on its own merits, and there’s not a lot of people who will inherently trust your judgement just because you’re the guy from the place. At the same time, having had a little of that as the jazz critic for the Times, it’s sad to me that we no longer have a piece in the paper on Thursday about the gig at the Village Vanguard on Tuesday night. That was a really wonderful tradition, and it mattered.

I wanted to talk about the Times. I feel like there aren’t as many live reviews in the paper as there used to be. I guess the argument for a live review would be that it’s a part of the historical record, and if it’s important enough and you missed it, it’s still news, right? And you can make some nice arguments about aesthetics or history or whatever. What did you think was most important about the live review, and what did you get out of it?

If you’ll permit me one moment of real immodesty, I feel like the live review is a very specific skill and format, and I think by the end I was really good at it. But it’s like being a woodworker and being able to make a really amazing, perfect stool — it’s this very specific thing. It’s different from feature writing, and you work quickly, and it’s about precision and a certain amount of poetry. I feel like at its best the live review articulates something about that moment in time but also about the state of the music. And you know, some of them are disposable, some of them just come and go. But some really capture something about the energy of the music. And the fact is that jazz remains a music that is ideally experienced live, preferably in a fairly intimate environment. And it’s really important to have someone who is able to bear witness. I don’t know if this is really true, but I feel like a lot of musicians didn’t really understand how vital that was to the ecology of the art form until it went away. It’s really important, and it’s unfortunate that there’s really no incentive for it.

And what to you was an ideal live review?

The jazz reviews in the Times were generally 400 to 500 words. So ideally you’re able to capture the feeling in the room and you’re able to sort of bring the reader into that moment with you, convey a bit of what it was that happened and what it felt like, but then also place the music and the artist into some kind of historical and aesthetic context. The thing that I loved was when you went into a gig and didn’t know what the story was going to be and it just emerged over the course of the performance. Those were rare.

How often were you going to gigs when you were writing for the Times — more than you were reviewing, right?

Oh, yeah. This book really is, on some level, a chronicle of that time. I lived on 14th Street for 10 years, and during those 10 years I was usually out five nights a week, sometimes hitting a couple of gigs a night.

A good critic helps you understand all the angles on a thing — why does it happen this way, what are the forces that went into it?

You also wrote pop reviews at the Times. Did you enjoy doing that?

I loved it. That was one thing that I really appreciated about the Times. When I got there — and this is a precedent established by Robert Palmer and carried on by Peter Watrous and Ben Ratliff and Jon Pareles — there was this understanding that, O.K., you’re a jazz guy, but you can write about whatever you want. I reviewed Katy Perry. Every once in a while, I would get criticism from someone in the jazz community, who would say, why are you writing about Miranda Lambert or whatever — as if it were a zero-sum game. To me it’s a specious argument. There’s no reason not to be aware of everything else that’s happening, and it just so happens that I love Miranda Lambert, and I have a selective appreciation for Taylor Swift, and there are people in country and hip hop and pop who I’m really behind — maybe more so than many of the musicians I write about, but that’s just my own personal taste.

The chapter in your book on the Soulquarian movement was enlightening. I feel like I haven’t read much about D’Angelo or his album Voodoo in a jazz context.

When I thought about what the most important jazz albums of the 20th century were, Voodoo was pretty close to the top of the list, actually, because I feel like the evidence is everywhere. I mean, Dilla’s influence is pretty much settled fact at this point, but jazz critics by and large aren’t really equipped to talk about that, which is fine. I felt really closely connected to it, and so to me, it felt important.

Can you tell me a little bit about your background? You’re from Hawaii, right?

Born and raised in Honolulu. My parents were entertainers, so I was born into this kind of show biz environment. I was interested in the drums from a really early age, and so as a kid I played ukulele and then I played drums, but I was also always really interested in writing, and always considered myself a musician and a writer, and they were sort of separate tracks. They converged when I went to college in Philadelphia. I was gigging in Philly and then interned at the Philadelphia City Paper. Within a month or two of being there, I started writing for the City Paper. My very first interview was with Joshua Redman in, I think, 1996, and so I learned on the job. I had no journalism training. I didn’t write for the school paper. I was an English major with a poetry concentration. I started covering the local scene and really made every mistake you can make and learned a lot by being a part of a newsroom. It was a great experience, just picking up a paper every week, and there’s your byline, and also learning that it matters what you say about somebody. I would go to the club and a musician would say, “What do you mean by this?” Just understanding that criticism does not exist in a bubble — it’s a functional part of the ecology of jazz. And in my experience, if you were tough but your argument made sense, usually musicians respected you if you could back it up.

So when did you make your way over to New York?

I moved to New York at the end of 1998, and I was writing for JazzTimes and some other places at that point, and then I began working on a book with George Wein. I spent three full years just writing that book with him, his memoir. And so that was a deep immersion in jazz history and his story. After that I started my column at JazzTimes and it was right around that time that Gary Giddins left the Voice and retired his column, “Weather Bird.” So I threw my hat in the ring, and Francis Davis got the column but I inherited the live component. I became sort of the live reviewer for the Voice, which was a really important experience for me. I think I was the last person who Bob Christgau mentored at the Voice, which was really a wonderful experience. He was very tough — I learned an enormous amount.

He gave his writers a lot of freedom, right?

He was very trusting, but he was also extremely exacting. And when he would call to edit a piece I would start sweating. Every word, every turn of phrase, every metaphor, every adjective had to be explicable. So there was no room for lazy writing at all. One of the things I learned through working with Bob was, don’t waste time with a slow, flowery lede. Get to the point. It was really like boot camp, and it was only two or three years, but it was fantastic training. It was a level of editorial scrutiny that I had never received at Downbeat or JazzTimes. And it was great preparation — you know, there used to be this pipeline, where you would survive the Voice and then you’d get noticed by the Times, and that actually happened for me. Ben Ratliff needed some support and they were looking for someone to contribute.

Wasn’t that Ratliff’s route, too? He wrote some stuff for the Voice and then Peter Watrous took him in.

Exactly. So I was the last person to come through that particular pipeline. So it was in 2005 that I began contributing to the Times, initially just doing listings, just to ease Ben’s burden. And then pretty soon I started writing reviews as well.

I feel like journalists across many different areas of expertise are as beleaguered as jazz musicians in the marketplace. When you talk to jazz musicians about Spotify and the streaming economy, it feels pretty related to the plight of journalists in the clickbait economy.

The Times has a relatively robust history in terms of jazz criticism. John S. Wilson, for instance, was a heavy hitter. How far back does it go?

John S. Wilson was the first jazz critic. Then Robert Palmer. For a very long time — and this is just an anomaly of the history of the paper — it was generally the norm that there were two people in the small corps of pop critics who were jazz-literate. For a very long time it was Palmer and Jon Pareles, and then it was Pareles and Watrous, and then it was Watrous and Ratliff, and then it was Ratliff and me. And then for about six months, it was just me, and then I left. So to me it’s unfortunate that — because it wouldn’t have taken very much to keep that going — but — well, I should leave it at that. Basically it comes down to people who read the paper in print are not trackable. They don’t generate pageviews. And so they’re invisible. And a pretty substantial portion of readers who turned to the Times to a large extent for jazz and classical coverage were invisible. And so their voices were not factored in when certain decisions were made.

Over the past few years in the Times, as far as jazz coverage is concerned, I’ve noticed that there has been less of an emphasis on live reviews, and more of an emphasis on features or columns with the occasional live review if the show is important enough. Giovanni Russonello’s sporadic feature stories on jazz are great, but the piece he writes at the end of every month on the three or five best jazz shows seems much more web-friendly and doesn’t seem to be much of a replacement for the regular live review. It’s nice to see that live coverage is still happening to an extent, though.

Yeah, Gio is a friend, and I think the section is in good hands as far as jazz coverage is concerned. But it’s difficult. Gio is not able to what Ben and I were able to do in an earlier era. And so he does the best with what he can, and it’s crucially important. What I’ve been trying to do at WBGO is to fill some of the gap, covering the scene. We don’t run live reviews, but we cover the music in a lot of different ways, and I try to do so in a way that’s really multidimensional.

What originally attracted you to criticism as opposed to straight reporting on jazz and music?

The critics were the people who wrote the liner notes back in the day. And so some of the first names that I knew in jazz writing were Nat Hentoff and Ira Gitler and A.B. Spelman and Amiri Baraka. So criticism was always very appealing to me. It also struck me as a discipline that allowed for a certain expression of personality. I can do straight reporting — I’ve done plenty of it — but I’ve always considered myself a critic. And I feel like there’s a fundamental misperception about what criticism actually is. People think criticism is, first and foremost. evaluative, but I think it’s actually first and foremost contextual. A good critic helps you understand all the angles on a thing — why does it happen this way, what are the forces that went into it?

I feel like there are a lot of parallels between jazz and journalism itself, one of them being that you are sort of expected to compose on the fly, in a way.

Well, the thing that comes to mind when you say that is, I feel like journalists across many different areas of expertise are as beleaguered as jazz musicians in the marketplace. When you talk to jazz musicians about Spotify and the streaming economy, it feels pretty related to the plight of journalists in the clickbait economy. But I wouldn’t dare compare the work of a jazz critic to the work of a jazz artist, in terms of improvisational acumen or whatever. So it feels different to me. But I don’t know whether musicians fully comprehend the extent to which jazz journalists are struggling every bit as much as the musicians, and maybe more so in many cases. It really is, for most people doing it, a labor of love, although it isn’t always expressed as such.

I guess you’re critical of things you love, right? I’m wondering who were some of the jazz critics you gravitated to. You mentioned Hentoff and Gitler and Baraka, but who do you return to?

So, I’m in my 40s, and the generation that I have looked up to — they’re now in their 60s and 70s: Gary Giddins and Francis Davis and Stanley Crouch. All of those guys have been really important to my development. And when I was working on George’s book, I made a really deep study of Whitney Balliett, and he was also really important. Through Giddins I really came to appreciate Martin Williams, Dan Morgenstern — really, I’ve read everybody and learned from almost everybody. And to a certain extent this book is me planting a flag for my generation, which is kind of the tail end of Generation X.

It seems like it’s the only book in that category right now.

I’m really fortunate that I’m the first person of my age group to publish a book like this. There’s a lot of great, younger critics who are really making an impact now, and I have no doubt that the state of jazz criticism is in good hands. But I do feel in a certain way like a transitional figure. I feel like I really, really got the Bad Plus, and Vijay, and Mary Halvorson — that to me felt like music that was contemporaneous with my experience. And for someone like Francis Davis or Gary Giddins, it wasn’t their experience. It was something they could appreciate and understand and place into a historical context, but for me, it was in my own backyard.

You said your book is a kind of planting of a flag, but are there any literary antecedents for you in the jazz book world?

Both of Greg Tate’s essay collections are essential. Greg is such a model for how to maintain the highest level of sort of integrity and cultural criticism and be open to forces outside the strictly aesthetic, to just be aware of the political context and the social context. He’s really one of a kind in his generation in that regard. I’ve long been a big admirer of Gary’s work, and Visions of Jazz as well as his “Weather Bird” column were really important to me. The Alex Ross book The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century — that was a really important antecedent because it was important to me that my book have a certain narrative momentum. I felt like Alex did such an amazing job with that book, taking an enormous amount of context and sheer information and presenting it in a way that felt as if there were an inexorable forward pull.

This music is so volatile and generative right now. I don’t think that the state of the music, on creative terms, has been in a better place maybe since the ’60s. It’s just a really exciting time to be paying attention. And the challenge is that the commercial infrastructure and all of that is kind of fucked.

I thought it was interesting that you started the book with Kamasi Washington. I guess it’s a good news hook because he’s pretty popular right now, but also, I feel like your first chapter is sort of your thesis, right?

For me, there were a few small insights in that first chapter that I felt were really, really important, and one of them was that the sort of culture of conservation that Wynton Marsalis embodies didn’t begin with him. Then the funny thing is that I began writing that chapter before anybody knew Kamasi Washington’s name outside Los Angeles; Kamasi exploded while I was writing the book, so as I was grappling with the idea of Kamasi and what he meant, it presented me with a perfect opportunity to bring Wynton in. I really didn’t want to begin the book by talking about Wynton, but I realized that the conversation around these artists was meaningful. The idea of a messiah or a savior is a renewable topic; it was said about Wynton and it was said about Kamasi, and you couldn’t find two more different musicians — in every way these guys are completely almost opposites. But I was really pleased with the way they sort of fit into this grid of, “What is jazz?” Is it progress of a fixed set of values or is it both?

Do you want to write another book about jazz?

We’ll see what happens — maybe there will be room for a sequel at some point. That’s what’s so exciting. This music is so volatile and generative right now. I don’t think that the state of the music, on creative terms, has been in a better place maybe since the ’60s or arguably the ’70s, which are an unfairly maligned decade. It’s just a really exciting time to be paying attention. And the challenge is that the commercial infrastructure and all of that is kind of fucked. But if you are an artist and you can figure out a way to make it work, this is an exciting time, and if you’re a consumer, it’s an incredibly exciting time.

There are so many jazz musicians now, partly, I guess, because of the boom in jazz education, which you talk about in your book. I guess there isn’t necessarily enough work in jazz for every musician, but there’s still a whole lot of talent out there.

The bar for proficiency gets higher and higher and higher. And there is a certain truth to the complaint that you sometimes hear even from someone like Ethan Iverson, which is that we’re losing touch with the folk element of the music, but at the same time, you encounter someone like David Virelles, and it’s a different folk element, but it’s there.

That’s true. I guess that’s sort of the point of your book, right?

Yeah, and it’s funny, I was thinking about this. One of the biggest challenges for me as a writer with this book was, where do things belong? I knew that I wanted to do a combination of profiles and thematic chapters; it ends up being 12 chapters — six profiles and six idea chapters. So if there’s a chapter on jazz education and there’s a chapter on globalism and there’s a chapter on mentorship, well, what do you do with a person like Lionel Loueke, who could be a major player in any one of those chapters? There’s no clear divisions on this stuff. Almost anyone in the book could have factored in at other places.

It’s all interconnected. Yesterday on Twitter, I saw somebody who was new to jazz soliciting album recommendations, but I feel like that question is so much more difficult to answer now. What would you say to someone who asks you that?

One of the things that I would tell anyone is go hear live music. Go hear it. And it depends on where this person lives. If they’re in New York, I would say go to the Vanguard tomorrow night, and whoever’s there, check it out. Go to the Jazz Standard. Go to Smoke. Go to Smalls. I mean, I am as big a fan of Kind of Blue as anyone, but there was a time when you would say, “Oh, you need to listen to Kind of Blue, you need to listen to Time Out by Dave Brubeck.” And I’m extremely grateful to Jazz at Lincoln Center and to Ken Burns’s Jazz for establishing a sort of consensus canon and a kind of bedrock literature that is basically infallible. Like, nobody would argue that what’s in that canon should not be in that canon. But I feel like we’re in a place now where, if you came to me and asked me where to start, would I point you to Louis Armstrong’s Hot Fives & Sevens? No, why would I do that?

What was the album or artist that got you into jazz?

In the book, I talk about how Jason Moran had a road to Damascus moment with “‘Round Midnight,” and I actually had one myself. I was maybe 14, and the Chick Corea Akoustic Band came to Honolulu. I didn’t know anything about the band, but I was a drummer so I knew Dave Weckl, who was a member of the trio. My dad took me to see this concert, which was at an arena — we sat in the fifth row — and I thought I was going to be bored because I was just there for the drummer, but I’ll never forget: Chick opened with a solo piano, free-improvised prelude to “On Green Dolphin Street,” which was a tune that I didn’t know at the time, and the clarity and the beauty of his execution — I was riveted within the first five seconds.

I guess that’s why you should see jazz live.

Absolutely.

Who did you have in mind when you wrote this book?

I don’t know how this book will be received, but my hope is that older jazz fans and critics might learn something about this younger generation that they don’t understand at all — and also that people who are of that generation who are now in their 20s might not feel quite as alienated from this precedent. Because, I don’t know, to me it’s just all one big family. It’s difficult enough to love jazz in the 21st century. It’s fucking hard to be an advocate of this music; we’re assaulted at every turn by market forces and disinterest and by Drake, so why should there not be some solidarity?

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Matthew Kassel is a freelance writer who has contributed to The New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal and The Columbia Journalism Review. 

Editor: Dana Snitzky