Features • Spring 2026 - Fear
Gezi
Once again, a newborn cried for the first time. The bald scream carried her voice through crowds in a chestnut-smelling street, rousing the cats from their curbside sleep. The sound stretched farther on to the trees of Taksim as they shuddered with an intensity foreign to them. The cats knew of what was coming before us. They found Spirit in a corner of İstiklal, licked and nursed her. They were the ones who would tell her about the name of the street, about how long before it meant independence, it meant dismissal and rebellion. They told her, as she cried, that she was rebelling even now when she did not know the word for it. They were the ones who decided that the time was right and carried the newborn to a nearby park. The cats, from atop the branches of Gezi, all silent in their knowing, wanted to show Spirit the trees.
Poetry • Spring 2026 - Fear
There’s something to be said about those little birds inside the eggs, with the sticky baby down and bones melted tender. This morning, you call me soup-for-brains and I imagine a boy’s guts cupped inside the feathered belly on my plate—another boy pressed open like a drum, a membrane. I drink the brine from a jar of Koon Chun plums for breakfast. Practice, I say, and you call me Pussy for the first time all week. They say it doesn’t taste like anything. Just the salt of the duck and the blood-tang of marrow. But I forgot you’re tutoring Leah Wong at her place today, so I turn and face your black-feathered buzzcut. No time for a game behind the school with the Chus’ half-popped basketball, which yesterday I poked till it dimpled and likened it to one of her mom’s big fake ones, and you hit me. For a split-second I thought I saw your eyes turn milky and your spine go baby-bent, but I pulled up your T-shirt and you were still hairless as a girl, your skin opaque. So it’s dinnertime and Mom isn’t home yet and all I have is the chick in my egg. He’s just boiled awake, beak parting to call me Dumbass. Soft. My fingers turn to yellow protein in calcium dust, prying you into this wet, scalding kitchen. Walls gum-pink and beating; I take you where heat reigns.
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From the Archives
Poetry • Spring 2018
1
Agreed. I sat in a house nearby this railroad. A place with two rooms I remember owning. I was cornered there a long time. Hunched over. Fishing in that stove for scraps I hid. Reminds me of
eating. Or rather telling time. Not the stains or that purling in my gut, but the slow blood heavy in my fingertips, lingering underneath, those bloodbanks ready for hulling, as if they
space, as wide as
a ruined barn
that’s rented, battered or like a raw deal at ten o’clock in the morning, that’s repairing then chafing itself, each time dawn breaks, rasping. I hear it.
2
In that city, back in the far field of railroad yards, I turned up. Out of the inflamed river and burrowed into the bank’s slop. It was revealed what my sodden wallet held: some nickels
I imagined gently being painted, my face on each one. There were times before now.
again. The water is deserted
by its river.
Features • Winter 2020 - Feast
*Talia Lavin '12 is a freelance journalist based in Brooklyn. She has worked at the New Yorker, the Huffington Post and Media Matters, and written for the New Republic, the Nation, and the New York Times Review of Books, among other publications. Though Lavin first encountered the world of the far-right while fact-checking stories for the New Yorker, it was not until the the "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, in 2017, that she began to publish her own coverage of the movement. "It was sort of a seismic national moment," she recalls, "and my experience of it was as a Jew, watching these anti-Semitic chants, and the horror of that." She published her first feature on the far-right shortly thereafter; her subsequent work has focused mostly on investigating and unraveling the mechanics of reactionary forces in the United States. She will publish a book on the subject, Culture Warlords, with Hachette Books in October. Lavin spoke with Advocate Publisher Eliya Smith '20 by phone in early January. This interview has been condensed and edited for brevity and clarity.*
**EOS: In "[Age of Anxiety](https://newrepublic.com/article/153153/age-anxiety)," which you wrote almost a year ago, you had this great quote: "the state of the union, it seems, is scared as hell." Is fear still the predominating emotion in the United States, or do you feel like it's morphed into something else?**
TL: I think we are still definitely a nation led by fear. I think the predominant emotion that nationalists like Trump prey on is fear. And propaganda outlets like Fox quite actively stoke it. People on the other side of the spectrum are also feeling a great deal of fear. Fear towards the environment, fear of war --- just a whole lot of terror in this world. And fear, as I am learning from my own experiences with panic disorder, can be really powerful. The answer isn't necessarily to tell people to calm down; I don't think the rational response to the world right now is to be calm. I do think there is a way of sort of cooling your fear, acknowledging that things are valid and you're right, but you need to be part of the world, and to fix things as best you can.
**EOS: You spend so much time researching and steeping yourself in these things that I assume are really hard to encounter. On a personal level, how do you deal with that? What kind of steps you take to insulate yourself emotionally, if that's even possible?**
TL: I make sure that I'm in community with people. I have a pretty robust group of people who are either reporters or activists who deal with this stuff on a regular basis. And that really helps, just in terms of talking to people who understand. If I say, "ugh, this particular hate meme that I've seen crop up on Telegram is bothering me today," they won't be like, "well, why are you exposing yourself to that stuff?" They get it.
Everyone who covers the far right --- men and women, although for sure women have it worse --- has experienced harassment, and stress, and the horror of being exposed to that kind of propaganda day in and day out. Especially as a Jew, it becomes pretty weird. Like when I was researching my book this past year, just to spend every day really immersed in anti-Semitic propaganda, it was disturbing and sometimes surreal. And then you wind up sounding like an absolute crazy person as parties, because the stuff that's on the top of your head is like, absolutely so far from --- even in the Trump era --- the stuff that people talk about on the regular. But it's just the stuff that's in your head.
**EOS: Do you find it fulfilling? I'm wondering how you motivate yourself to keep working on these projects, which I'm sure can be really painful.**
TL: I think that it's a very tumultuous time in history to be living through. And sometimes I think about what I would like to tell my children, should I have any, what I was doing during this time, and to be able to say that I was recording and sometimes just actively fighting the growing fascist movement in my country. It sounds cheesy, but that's something that gets me through the day. And the other thing is, again, being in community, having these comrades, and knowing that I'm working with other people who are facing the same pains, and even far worse situations in terms of threats, and who are continuing undaunted, is a motivator.
For anyone who is considering doing this kind of work, I think the most important thing to say is: don't be a lone cowboy. I think there can be kind of a machismo in the world of journalism. Practically, it's super helpful to have comrades who I can talk to. But then also just to have people who get it when you say, "hey, today's hard, I need a pep talk," or whatever. Being a lone cowboy is just not the way to do this work, 'cause you're gonna burn out really quickly.
**EOS: Do you find hopeful takeaways the more you dig? Are there reasons to feel like the escalation of the far-right might be turned around?**
TL: I have to say that I don't have an easy-pat answer to that. I think if you look at the landscape of the world, the reactionary forces are ascendant. And winning. If you look at just the absolute smoldering tire-fire that is the world right now, it's really hard to come to other conclusions. So I do think that we have to face that we're in sort of a long, dark night of the forces of reaction.
I will say that the people that give me hope, and the people that I talked to for my book that gave me a sense that there were people in the trenches fighting, were anti-fascists. And I, over the course of the past year or two, I have become someone who identifies as an anti-fascist. I know that term can be loaded, largely because of a really sort of dumb, inaccurate, reactionary media, and also because of the sort of instinctual desire of a lot of people in the center left have to see themselves as sort of virtuous, clean. But this is a dirty fight. The people who give me hope, or the people that I look to emulate or that I think are doing effective work in countering the rise of hate are people who are going through and looking at these chats, people who are infiltrating these groups.
I think we're at a point where the current administration is actively complicit in white supremacy and white nationalism, so you can't hope for top-down social censure. I think that whatever hope comes in countering hate groups is making sure that hate has a social cost, and that's on all of us. As someone with panic disorder, I'm not a frontline kinda gal. I don't do crowds. But I can do a lot of things at my keyboard. So can you.
**EOS: So in terms of... angle? I guess that would be the topic of this question. I feel like we're all sort of fed up with the 'this article is going to nuance the far-right' type of profile that we keep seeing. How do you write about, or how do you even approach thinking about the far-right in a way that yields insight but doesn't fall into that trap?**
TL: I do think it's important to look at the causes and mechanisms of radicalization. So I think, for example, Kevin Roose at the New York Times has done some good work on that, looking at people's YouTube histories, for example. I think that's important.
For me, the tug is not so much between how do I not write lush, flattering profiles of these gaping assholes but rather, how do I balance the fact that I feel a great deal of academic interest in this, versus always keeping the human toll of hate in the foreground. I think it's sort of inherently easier for me, because I'm the grandchild of Holocaust survivors, and so the consequences of, say, violent anti-Semitism are never super far from my mind. I think that I have some inherent advantages on that front --- my maternal family was really marinated in PTSD from what the Holocaust had done, and so my instinct has never been to valorize --- or even treat as cagey or funny --- any figures, no matter how ridiculous they can be.
The challenge [is] making sure your coverage reflects the real potential human toll of radicalization. And I think the way that I do that is just by keeping it in close communication with my own anger; making sure that my anger never gets dialed down or muted. You have to stay angry if you're going to write well about the far-right.
**EOS: I was going to ask you a question about how you feel like your Jewishness informs the work that you do, the stakes of reporting on people who so explicitly direct their hatred toward you, but I feel like you maybe just answered it.**
TL: I think it's really easy if you are not a target of hate --- whether that comes in the form of violent misogyny or anti-Semitism, anti-blackness --- it's easy to start treating this as an intellectual exercise. Or, you know, even foregrounding the humanity of these young men, rather than always keeping your eye on the prize, which is that they are merchants of hate.
The truth is, it's so easy to try to otherise people who are in hate groups and say, they're poor, they're dumb, they must be toothless and living in a trailer. No. The truth is, some of them are just as well-educated as you or me. It's much more about trying to find a sense of belonging and purpose and meaning --- that's often the galvanizing force for why people join hate groups. And any human being can fall prey to the desire for belonging and the desire to feel like they mean something.
I mean, no one wants to hear about the Nazi next door, but I think that it is important not to otherize, to say, "that could never be me, that could never be anyone I know, because I'm smarter, because I'm better." The truth is that hate groups prey on really universal thoughts. It's just like, "I'm lonely, and what does my life mean?" And then people come in with really easy, ready-made answers, like "it's the Jews," "it's the immigrants," "Jews bringing in the immigrants." "Here's this book, read some history. Have you checked out *Protocols of the Elders of Zion*?"
It is a weird thing to argue, to be like, 'don't otherize them.' But don't assume that no one you know could fall prey to this stuff, or that it's just a totally alien thing, when really, the things that drive people to hate are the same things that can drive people to do really laudable stuff: wanting to belong, wanting to change the world, wanting to make a difference. And hate groups can and do prey on those sentiments. Quite effectively.
Features • Fall 2013
In J.D. Salinger’s *Catcher in the Rye*, Manhattan serves as a catalyst for Holden Caulfield’s maturation. In Sylvia Plath’s *The Bell Jar*, literary ambition joins forces with New York in the development (and descent) of Esther Greenwood. In Marjane Satrapi’s *Persepolis*, assimilation into a Western culture independent from her parents’ Iran is essential to Marji’s self-realization.
According to this rubric, Tao Lin’s *Taipei* and Adelle Waldman’s* Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.* ought to be exemplary specimens of the bildungsroman. New York, immigrant parents, youth, and a literary career: These books have all the bearings of the transformative tale. And yet they are the antibildungsroman, their narratives fundamentally static and their protagonists allergic to growth. The sense of stasis that they develop, moreover, is essential to the project of each. In *Love Affairs* Waldman voices young literary Nate’s stubbornly prejudiced intuitions, unchanged despite his love affairs and politically correct education. In *Taipei*, Tao Lin narrates Paul’s wandering and placeless existence, unchanged despite changing circumstances and perception-altering substances. No enlightenments, revelations, or matured under-standings are on offer here. The point is to characterize the way things stay the same.
*
*Love Affairs of Nathaniel P*. begins with an en-counter: Nate sees Juliet on the street and starts to make small talk. Juliet responds,* Really?*, astonished that Nate considers his nonchalant inquiries appropriate given the occasion (what the occasion is, we don’t yet know). Before walking away, she calls him an asshole.
This encounter, it turns out, was the first time Juliet and Nate had seen each other since Juliet’s abortion, after his condom broke. In the pages following his confrontation with Juliet, we fall into the clutches of Nate’s consciousness, which is churning in self-defense, Nate convincing him-self and the reader that he is “a product of a post-feminist, 1980s childhood and politically correct, 1990s college education” and that he has there-fore committed no moral misdeed.
This opening scene sets up the central conflict of the novel: Is Nate a misogynistic asshole, or isn’t he? The book’s omniscient narrator presents a Nate who is rational, thoughtful, and critical, but reasonably so. He passes judgment on writers and friends and makes generalizations about women that have just enough of a ring of truth to pass, perhaps, as justifiable. When his girlfriend Hannah remarks that she doesn’t care whether or not people who wouldn’t appreciate *Lolita* read it anyway, “it flashed through Nate’s mind that Hannah’s position wasn’t very feminine. She sounded more like an aesthete than an educator, and women, in his experience, tended by disposition to be educators. He felt intuitively that she was paraphrasing someone else...and that the someone else was a man.”
Nate entertains the possibility that he’s a misogynist. He admittedly considers women to be uninterested in rational thought and favors “inherently masculine” writing. Yet whenever he’s caught articulating his gender-based prejudices, either aloud or to himself, he does so unquestioningly and almost confidently, at times nearly convincing the reader, too, of their harmlessness. In one instance, Nate labels a woman’s intellect as just another aspect of her feminine allure: “Atheism and Marxism and other such antiestablishment, intellectual isms are sexy in an attractive woman.” The feminist reader is inclined to shudder at the suggestion that men who read Marx can be Marxist, while women who read Marx can only be sexy, as Nate reinserts “antiestablishment” women into the very heterosexual, patriarchal establishment they are presumably rebel-ling against. Yet another reader, less quick to find offense, may accept Nate’s sexual attractions as just another rounding characteristic; don’t we all incorporate our intellectual prejudices into our sexual preferences?
Like Nate’s lovers—Hannah, Greer, and Elise—Adelle Waldman is steeped in the Brooklyn literary scene. Nate is clearly constructed out of bits and pieces of men that she has confronted in her own career and love affairs. Nate, therefore, is uncomfortably familiar and familiarly complicated. Because the narrator cleaves to Nate’s perspective throughout, any assessment of him falls to the reader. This process is aided by the introduction of Hannah, a sympathetic character whose intellect and independence threaten Nate’s preconceptions. Hannah stands her own in conversations with his male friends and with his best female friend Aurit, whom Nate deems the height of female intelligence. She challenges Nate’s confidence in his unwavering intellectual superiority. When Nate finds himself complaining to Hannah about an article pitch that was rejected, he worries: “Between the two of them, he had always played the role of the more successful writer. He had been the one to champion *her* work, to build *her* up. For their roles to be reversed, even temporarily, would only add to this sense of indignity.”
A couple of weeks after Nate and Hannah decide their relationship has failed, for reasons neither of them can articulate (but that clearly have something to do with Hannah’s threatening intellect), Hannah writes Nate an email. In it, she expresses her anger and calls Nate out on his transparent misogyny: “Why do you think it was that we had a good time when we hung out with Jason and Peter? It was because they were nice to me—they acted like they actually wanted to hear what I had to say, which you barely did at that point.”
While plenty of writing is described in *Love Affairs*, it is always seen through Nate’s eyes and related in his sharp critical terms. Hannah’s angry email is the only text that appears on the page naked and unfiltered, lending the reader a perspective independent of Nate. The perception enabled by this distance is revelatory. When Nate finishes reading the email that the reader, too, has read and presumably judged to be reasonable, he feels like doing a number of things: 1) throwing his computer against the wall; 2) running hard for ten miles; 3) reading a “very bracing, very austere, very *masculine* philosopher” like Schopenhauer; and 4) not getting back together with Hannah. His failure to respond to her email then provokes Hannah to send another, declaring Nate “a bigger asshole than I ever imagined.” The chiasmus between Hannah’s writing and Nate’s response grants the reader perspective, and the author a new voice. Through Hannah’s emails, Waldman briefly exits her protagonist’s consciousness to articulate the reasonable thoughts of the antagonized woman, and nudge the reader along in her assessment of Nate.
The *Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.* is a modern novel of manners. As its 19th- century predecessors, it details the social mores of a time and depicts a character striving to adapt to them while searching for a mate. Like the Bennet sisters at a high-society ball, Nate strains to contain his behavior within a taught decorum (in his case, to suppress misogynistic impulses within a politically correct society). In Waldman’s novel, as in all examples of the genre, drama derives from relationships, and complexity from conversation. Yet unlike *Pride and Prejudice*, the quintessential bildungsroman, *The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.* is a roman that investigates not a character’s bildung, but rather his resistance thereto. In skillfully conveying Nate’s consciousness, Wald-man examines the stubborn persistence of subtle prejudice in a politically correct society, without exiting the confines of the very mind whose prejudice she reveals.
*
* The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.* and *Taipei* might share, in some rendition, a nearly identical book-jacket description: Young man, in his mid-to-late twenties, with immigrant parents and Brooklyn literary connections, jaunts about the city, falls in and out of love, and remains essentially unchanged by it all. Yet despite taking place in the same city and the same time, the novels seem centuries apart. While Waldman echoes the conventions and concerns of the likes of Jane Austen, Tao Lin’s prose is more like that of Ernest Hemingway, or rather that of @ernest-hemingway, were the author to be alive, drugged, and an avid tweeter.
The opening sentences of *Taipei *do not introduce a moral conflict, as in *Love Affairs*, but rather a set of syntactical features. These features lay bare the novel’s style of narration and the difficulty it presents to a compassionate reading experience:
It began raining a little from a hazy, cloud-less-seeming sky as Paul, 26, and Michelle, 21, walked toward Chelsea to attend a magazine-release party in an art gallery. Paul had resigned to not speaking and was beginning to feel more like he was ‘moving through the universe’ than ‘walking on a sidewalk.’
Whenever a character is introduced, throughout the novel, her name is followed by an age. Hair color, height, and skin tone are often left out, but age is always included. This strictly numerical characterization—a narrative tic that flies in the face of the grade-school dictum, show, *don’t tell*—is journalistic and, like much of Tao Lin’s authorial style, sourced from the internet. As on any online profile, “26” and “21” serve to flatten Paul and Michelle, reducing them to the single characteristic that is most easily transcribed.
Yet another stylistic refrain appears in the second sentence: Phrases are packaged as quotations —“moving through the universe,” “walking on a sidewalk”—even though they are unspoken. The punctuation suggests that so many expressions in Paul’s world (in our world, as Tao Lin sees it) have become stock phrases or clichés that the author must put scare quotes around them to publicly acknowledge their uncouthness. If the removal of quotation marks from spoken text intimately unites narrator and character, Tao Lin’s insertion of quotations marks around unspoken text (we might call it “Solitary Direct Discourse”) does the opposite. Even the narrator is barred from the genuine expression of the characters whose thoughts it narrates.
As *Taipei *progresses, it becomes increasingly evident that Lin’s cold syntactical habits—the flattening of characters into quantifiable traits, the division of language into quoted phrases—mirror those of the novel’s protagonist. Paul, it’s announced loud and clear, is not at home in the world around him: “He was becoming isolated and unexplainable as one of those mysterious phenomena, contained within informational boxes, in picture-heavy books on natural history.” And: “He felt like a digression that had forgotten from what it digressed.” *Dispersed, indiscernible, dissembling, isolated, unexplainable, forgotten, digressed*: This is the vocabulary that describes Paul’s sense of himself in the world.
Paul’s relationship to himself is likewise isolated, dispersed, and digressed. He accesses his thoughts indirectly, as though looking at himself through a screen. “Paul became aware of himself analyzing when he should’ve left”; Paul “wanted to ask if this already happened, but didn’t know who to ask, then realized he wanted to ask him-self”; “Paul realized he was...rushing ahead in an unconscious, misguided effort to get away from where he was: inside himself.” Paul analyzes himself analyzing; perceives himself wanting to ask himself something; realizes his own desire to exit himself. He is anywhere but in his own body, and yet, as in the above quotations, he is anywhere but there as well.
Paul’s gratingly persistent “meta”-recognition might be labeled an effect of (or an affect of) the internet, which is aggressively featured in *Taipei* in the form of Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, StatCounter, Gawker, Wikipedia, Tumblr, and Gmail. One could argue that Tao Lin depicts, in the character of Paul, the existential consequences of existing simultaneously in person and online. Facebook, Tumblr, and MySpace allow Paul to observe himself, summarized in a profile and framed in photos, from a removed seat of observation. This mode of self-identification has punctured the boundary between the virtual and the real, leaving Lin’s protagonist with a third-person experience of self and with fantasies of “being able to click on his trajectory to access his private experience.” The internet, then, may be the only place where Paul feels at home: Stretched out on his yoga mat with his Mac-Book on his bent knees (a position he assumes throughout the novel) is just where Paul belongs.
*Taipei* often feels icy and ungenerous. The narrator is barred from characters; language is barred from expression; Paul is barred from the world and himself; and the reader is left barred from them all.
After splitting up with Michelle at the magazine release party in Chelsea, Paul goes to Taiwan to visit his parents. When he comes back, he goes to a Mexican restaurant, a book reading, and a BBQ-themed party, where he meets Laura, with whom he goes to another Mexican restaurant. A few days later, he and Laura take an Ambien and kiss each other lazily on her bed, until Paul looks at his phone, sees that two hours have gone by, and exclaims, “Jesus.”
Plot moves forward at an aggressively monotone pace. Chapters are broken into sections, and almost every section begins with a description of time or place: “In early June,” “At Legion, twenty minutes later,” “The next night,” “Around 1:30 a.m,” “On UCLA’s campus the next night,” “In his room, around 2:30 a.m.” “Around three hours later.” At each of these locations, Paul takes drugs and makes obtuse observations about aspects of his character or the nature of memory or time. He often buys groceries, frequently pineapple chunks, and eats to console himself: While marching on chronologically, the plot circles back on itself in cycles of consumption. Even when Paul makes grand revelatory perceptions, his character never develops, the drug’s temporarily altering effect always remaining just that.
About one hundred pages in, feeling lonelier, emptier, and more restless by the sentence, this particular reader was about to close the book, scorn Tao Lin, deactivate my Facebook, and go hug a friend, when *Taipei* took a surprising turn. Erin, 24, whose blog Paul has followed, begins to visit Paul more frequently, to share his drugs and attend his book readings. Erin, like Paul, is understated and wandering; but in each other’s company, their icy expression becomes dryly humorous banter:
“No, Beau,” said Erin.
“Nobo?” said Paul grinning.
“Beau. He said ‘mons pubis.’ Ew.”
“What does that mean?”
“It’s a part of the body,” said Erin with a worried expression.
Along with complementing each other’s cursory manner, Paul and Erin together develop a more authentic and expressive conversational mode. Paul confesses, “There was a period of like three days when I was really obsessed with you. But you weren’t responding to my email and I kind of lost the obsessive nature,” to which Erin responds, “Whoa.”
The couple’s increasing intimacy climaxes in their spontaneous decision to get married and visit Paul’s parents in Taipei, a place associated, from the outset, with a potential for spiritual transformation. In the first chapter, Paul imagines himself moving to Taipei mid-life and projecting “the movie of his uninterrupted imagination” onto the “shifting mass of everyone else,” thereby accessing a “second, itinerant consciousness.”
The hypothetical power of the honeymoon is quickly deflated: After several days in the foreign country, Paul and Erin confess to one another that they haven’t “noticed anyone” and had for-gotten they weren’t in America. Instead of inhabiting their new surroundings, Paul and Erin spend their time drugged, holding a MacBook in front of their faces, and filming themselves in the local McDonald’s. In some sense, they do realize Paul’s ambition to create a “movie of uninterrupted imagination,” but the outcome is hardly enlightenment. The specific landscape of Taipei serves as a mere backdrop to a static set of places that are not reliant on location: the World Wide Web and a global fast food chain. When Paul and Erin return from their numbed Asian vacation, then, they recommence the rhythm they’d established before they’d left and see each other less often. The novel largely returns to its early frigid-ity and monotonous pace.
Throughout *Taipei*, Paul remains untransformed and stubbornly seeks out facilitators of stasis—globally uniform restaurants, the quotidian consumption of drugs and pineapple. Yet at the end of the novel, believing (wrongly) that he’s overdosed on mushrooms, Paul declares distractedly, “I think I’m dead.” His false experience of death purportedly serves not as a conclusion, but as a source of revelation and regeneration. When he exits his deathbed, Paul feels running water as though for the first time, “cold, grasping, meticulous, aware.” And the book finishes with Paul saying “that he felt ‘grateful to be alive.’”
This supposedly revelatory ending, unearned by the nonevent that precedes it, identifies the novel not as a bildungsroman but rather a “bildungsromockery.” To conclude with such a facile and uncharacteristic revelation is to gesture at the genre of the bildungsroman, only to indicate what this novel is not. To read it as a member of the genre, as many critics have, is to mistake its very meaning and project. Early on, Paul acknowledges that “he didn’t want to die—less because he had an urge to live than because dying, like knitting or backgammon, seemed irrelevant to his life.” For Paul to conclude by adulating life, then, simply means that he’s grateful to have overcome a passing moment of irrelevance. To continue living, means continuing to do just what he’s done throughout the course of the novel; the epilogue, were there to be one, would chug along in the same static rhythm that defined Paul’s life before and then with Erin, and before, in, and after Taipei. This is not to say that Lin’s novel is devoid of a direction or project, but rather that it indulges in a recognizable modernity, in which perceptions are altered by the hour and statuses are updated accordingly, in which “transformation” is quotidian and not necessarily transformative.
Features • Winter 2012
Shiraz, 1971
Haile Selassie descends to the tarmac in a gabardine suit. The hot thin air of Shiraz greets the 79-year-old emperor before the line of salutes and the smiling Shah striding to meet him. The Shah of Iran and Emperor of Ethiopia embrace. The Shah thanks him, in English—such a pleasure to see you again, my friend. As the evening shadows sink over the Zagros Mountains beyond the runway, they set off down the fresh highway in a fleet of black Mercedes limousines. The 40 desert miles to Persepolis are richly lit, as if by magic, with long rows of hissing gas-lamps, a reminder of the liquid wealth underlying the affair. At Persepolis, ancient seat of the Achaemenids, they arrive at the glittering tent-city erected for the occasion. All is in place, lavishly conceived and immaculately achieved.
The Shah and his guests have assembled here amid the ruins of Persia’s ancient capital to celebrate two and a half millennia of Iranian civilization. They will feast for five hours on golden caviar and roast peacock flown in from Paris. Spiro Agnew will whisper to Prince Philip—did the old Shah really spend two hundred million on this whole shebang? The Greek president, glutted, will doze off during the sound-and-light show. Orson Welles will opine that this was no party of the year; it was the celebration of 25 centuries.
Haile Selassie—lone emperor in a crowd that includes eight kings, three ruling princes, twelve presidents, ten sheiks, three prime ministers, two sultans, two vice presidents, and a cardinal—will stick close to the Shah. As the night’s gala nears its end, the Emperor will move in close and tell the Shah, with a conspiratorial note, that he feels the sorcery of history in the air tonight. The Emperor reminds his host that they, as the divine heirs to the world’stwo oldest surviving kingdoms, have the full thrust and approbation of the past propelling them to greatness. At the moment, anything seems possible. The Shah, ebullient with success and fine wine, will smile and say—yes, and good thing, for there is so much still to achieve. The party will disband, and the Shah and the Emperor will return to the air-conditioned comfort of their tents. In just a few years both will be overthrown. By the end of the decade, they will both be dead.
***
Back in April 1970, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi ordered his advisers to prepare an anniversary celebration to be held in eighteen months. His directive commanded that the pageant demonstrate how “Iran’s continued existence and its national sovereignty is possible through the continuation of the monarchy.” It was to be held in Persepolis, for no other site could better conjure the imperial grandeur of Iran’s past.
The problems soon became apparent. The nearest city, Shiraz, was ill-prepared to host such an event: the airport could only service small planes and the road to the ruins was dilapidated and unlit at night. The Shah told them money was no object. Fifteen million dollars were spent retrofitting the airport. Specialists from the state oil company were brought in to rig rows of temporary gas- lamps along the highway, and 250 bulletproof Mercedes-Benz limousines were ordered.
Architects drew up plans for a new luxury hotel beside the ruins, but it was decided that eighteen months was not enough time. Someone had the idea to build a tent city instead. Empress Farah blanched at the suggestion, declaring that all her guests should feel that they were staying in a palace. And so the maker of the world’s most expensive tents, Jansen AG of Switzerland, was employed to design 54 royal blue, silk-lined tents for the guests. Each air-conditioned, fireproof tent could withstand hundred-kilometer winds, and came complete with wall-to-wall carpeting and his-and-her marble bathrooms.
When construction began they discovered that the desert around Persepolis was a notorious haven for poisonous snakes. The area was sprayed with poison. Loads of snake, lizard, and tarantula carcasses were gathered and trucked away to the local dump. Versailles’ horticulturalist was engaged to landscape the parched environs; 1500 cypress trees and 50,000 carnations were shuttled by Iranian Air Force jets to the new airport at Shiraz, then to the ruins by army truck.
Maxim’s of Paris—then the most famous restaurant in the world—closed down for two weeks and flew 159 of its chefs, bakers, and waiters to Iran to prepare the feast. Attendants and sommeliers were brought in from the Shah’s favorite hotel in St. Moritz. The foreign ministry, tasked with ensuring for- eign leaders’ attendance, played hardball, linking the attendance of British, French, and German rul- ers to drilling and mining contracts in Iran. The ministry of culture recruited Orson Welles to narrate a documentary movie, Flames of Persia, about the pageant. In exchange, the Shah’s brother-in-law put up the financing for Welles’ next movie.
***
The festivities began with the feast. Six hundred guests stuffed themselves for five hours on the six- course meal, featuring quail’s eggs stuffed with golden caviar, saddles of lamb with truffles, crayfish mousse, and 92 imperial peacocks (with intact tail feathers) surrounded by a court of roast quail. They consumed 2,500 bottles of fine French wine and champagne: 1945 Chateau Lafite, 1911 Moët Chan- don, 1959 Dom Perignon Rosé.
It was said that the only thing Iranian about the night was the caviar. Those with an eye for irony noted that the Shah, who was allergic, had artichoke instead.
With heavy bellies and swaying gaits the guests made their way to a sound-and-light show over the ruins of Persepolis, complete with fireworks and a new electronic composition by the French avant- garde composer Iannis Xenakis. The next day, guests were treated to a cavalcade of soldiers outfitted in the full regalia of Persian armies through the ages, with garish costumes, false beards, and chariots. A parade of horses pulled a model castle and three reproduced ancient oared warships past the viewing stands. One news anchor remarked that the Shah had out-DeMilled Cecil B. DeMille.
No one was quite sure what to make of the whole affair. Pakistan’s president returned home to declare a national holiday in Iran’s honor. Many historians point to the pageant as the Shah’s crossing of the Rubicon, the moment when he proved just how staggeringly out of touch he was with his people. The ostentation of the pageant eclipsed the 2,500 schools, 2,500 clinics, and 2,500 books commissioned for the anniversary. From exile, Ayatollah Khomeini declared, “these festivities have nothing to do with the noble people of Iran.” The liberal press openly criticized the Shah, attacking the spending and the tastelessness. “Lavish at the Expense of Starving People,” “An Insult to our Culture to serve French food,” read the headlines. A now-declassified memo from the British embassy in Tehran described the event as a daring enterprise, but marred by the element of excess, overwhelmed by the Shah’s megalomania. Their analysis put the cost of the event at several hundred million dollars. In all the pageantry, it was easy to miss the small symbol at the center of it all.
** *
This is a story about the use and misuse of history.
Two thousand five hundred and ten years earlier, Cyrus the Great marched his victorious army through the gates of Babylon. Cyrus, a skilled politician as well as a consummate conqueror, immediately began the second front of his conquest. He issued an edict, announcing himself to his new subjects.
“I am Cyrus, king of the world, the great king, the powerful king, king of Babylon, king of Sumer and Akkad, king of the four quarters of the world ... The needs of Babylon and of all its cities I gladly attended to.” He portrayed himself as a liberator, who overthrew the unpopular king Nabonidus with the blessing of the Babylonian god Marduk. Then he made a bold and original declaration of tolerance, promising to promulgate religious freedom and equality in Babylon. He pledged to restore the shrines of gods that had been damaged under the old king, and to allow the Jews—kept as slaves in Babylon for generations—to return to their homeland.
These words have come down to us in a document known as the Cyrus Cylinder, a barrel-shaped clay seal, nine inches long, incised with lines of cuneiform text. It was discovered by British archaeologists amid the foundations of a wall in Babylon. Fragments of the same inscription have been found across the area.
The Shah chose Cyrus and the Cylinder to be the focal points for the anniversary celebrations. The Cylinder was represented as a symbol for all the achievements of Iranian civilization. Its image appeared at the center of the logo for the anniversary. Small copies were fashioned in clay and distributed to guests. The Shah convinced the British Museum to lend the original for the year of the anniversary.
** *
The tomb of Cyrus is a simple and elegant structure, a gabled chamber atop a six-stepped pedestal, with a small opening on its western side. Built from white limestone, it blends in with the camel- colored earth and hills that surround it. It sits at the heart of Cyrus’ capital, Pasargadae, “the camp of Persia.”
It was here that the celebration actually began, before the foreign guests arrived. Just before noon on October 12, 1971, the Shah, dressed in his full military regalia, walked a vivid aquamarine carpet to a low stage opposite the tomb. Taking to the lectern, he looked right past the sea of dignitaries and dark-clad soldiers assembled before him. Instead, he directly addressed the spirit of the long-dead king in his mausoleum, “O Cyrus, great King, King of Kings, Achaemenian King, King of the land of Iran. I, the Shahanshah of Iran, offer thee salutations from myself, and from my nation.” The Shah’s voice echoed across the plain. “Rest in peace,” he told Cyrus, “for we are awake, and we will always stay awake.” It was a stark and somber ceremony, especially in contrast with what was to come.
At the close of the pageant in Persepolis, after the banquet and light show and procession, after his guests had gone home, the Shah returned to Tehran for the final event of the anniversary celebrations: the ceremonial opening of the massive white-marble Shahyad (Kings’ Memorial) Tower built across the capital’s Eisenhower Avenue. Underneath the tower’s vault there is a small museum with several dozen objects selected to represent the arc of Iranian history. In its place of honor, at the museum’s center, was the Cyrus Cylinder itself.
The cracked clay artifact is perhaps a strange choice to represent 2,500 years of history. Compared to the objects surrounding it in the museum, it is not particularly beautiful or impressive. If not for its placement, most would walk right by it. Why, out of two and a half millennia of culture and artistic achievement, did he choose this?
** *
The Shah was not of royal blood. He was born to Reza Khan, a soldier who came from a small village northeast of the capital and rose to the command of an elite Cossack brigade. When he was two years old, his father led a British-sponsored coup against the foundering Qajar monarchy. Five years later, his father seized the Peacock Throne, declaring a new imperial dynasty with his son as heir. The new Shah initiated a broad program of institutional reform. He revered the secular vision of Kemal Atatürk, founding father of modern Turkey, emulating his project of modernization and uprooting Islam from the state. He chose the name Pahlavi for his new dynasty as a none-too-subtle reference to the name of the language spoken in Iran before the arrival of Islam.
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi carried on this enterprise when he succeeded his father in 1941. They both saw modernization as the best path toward restoring Persia’s former greatness. As they struggled against the religious establishment for influence, they found themselves pitted against the traditional purveyors of political legitimacy. So, from the beginning, the Pahlavis drew instead on Iran’s pre-Islamic past to vindicate their rule. When the son sought to aggrandize his rule in the eyes of his people and the world, he went all the way back to link himself with the great king Cyrus.
The anniversary celebrations would be a reflection of the Shah’s understanding and vision of Iranian history. He saw the soul of the nation divided between its Zoroastrian first millennium and its Islamic second millennium. The goal, according to one of the event’s main organizers, was to accentuate the imperial grandeur of this first era at the detriment of the Islamic second. This emphasis would, he hoped, strengthen his own hand against his most vociferous critics—the mullahs in the holy city of Qom, particularly the Ayatollah Khomeini, exiled after denouncing the Shah to his congregation as a tyrant and a “wretched, miserable man.” It would also present the Shah’s vision for a third millennium of Persian grandeur, a merging of Cyrus the Great’s imperial ambitions with modern economic development, supported by the nation’s newfound oil wealth. Iran, the Shah believed, would take its rightful place as a prosperous, industrialized welfare state at the top of an interconnected, secular world. He liked to call this Iran of his dreams, Tamaddon-e Bazorg—or, “The Great Civilization.”
** *
In the year leading up to the anniversary, the Shah led an international publicity campaign seeking to enhance Iran’s status to that of a world power. At the forefront of this campaign was the Cyrus Cylinder, which the Shah put forward as the world’s first declaration of human rights, proof that some of the grand tenets of Western civilization originated in ancient Persia. The campaign was successful. A reproduction of the cylinder is, to this day, displayed prominently beside the United Nations Security Council chamber in New York. The Cylinder represented a past Persia that was powerful, progressive, and magnanimous—synonymous with the Shah’s vision for the new Iran he hoped to build.
But the Shah’s vision of the Cylinder was flawed and specious, countered historians. The declarations of religious freedom in the Cyrus Cylinder were neither bold nor original, but rather consistent with comparable proclamations that had been made by Babylonian rulers assuming the throne going back two centuries before Cyrus. As for his promised manumission of the Jews, no such pledge is found on the Cylinder; the mention comes only from references to the Persian king in the Old Testament. The Cylinder is not even Iranian: it is a Babylonian document, written by a Babylonian scribe for a Babylonian audience, found in present-day Iraq, and now the property of a British museum. That this artifact was propagated as it was as an artifact and emblem of Persian civilization speaks to the Shah’s faith in the belief that he who controls the present, controls the past.
It is the same story with the staging of history in the pageant itself. The Shah transmuted two and a half millennia of dynamic, effervescent history into a static event, simplified into a series of visual cues, bent to his will. By skipping back to the nation’s inception he could present simple grandeur, a glorious pre-Islamic past, free from the power of the mullahs. Unencumbered by narrative, he could avoid acknowledging the presence of those narratives and people that did not agree with him.
A few years later he codified this narrative by shifting Iran’s calendar from the Islamic system to a new “imperial calendar,” beginning with the accession of Cyrus rather than the Prophet’s flight from Mecca. Overnight, the year changed from 1355 to 2535. It was another example of the hubris of a man who believed he had the power to rewrite history. And like the pageant at Persepolis, it united the Shah’s two blocks of opponents, on the left and in the mosques, against him.
After the Revolution swept away the Shah and his fantasies, the new regime sought to play the same game, and banished allusions to the country’s pre-Islamic past. Ayatollah Khalkhali, new Chief Justice of the Revolutionary Courts, published a book countering the Shah’s cult of Cyrus, depicting the king as “a tyrant, a liar, and a homosexual,” and calling for the immediate destruction of Cyrus’s tomb and Persepolis. Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed.
** *
In the shadow of Kuh-i-Rahmat, the Mountain of Mercy, the ruins of Persepolis endure. They are largely empty of visitors now, with fewer and fewer tourists willing to brave the mercurial regime to behold the ancient capital.
Alongside the Palace of Darius and Gate of All Nations, the tent city built by the Shah endures. In front of the Shah’s grand tent are two signs, hand-painted in blue in elegant Persian cursive. On the left is a Qur’anic verse, a pointed warning, “Examine what your predecessors did and learn a lesson.” On the right, another warning—“Don’t throw garbage.”
Fiction • Fall 2010
After his father died, he started telling people he had to go somewhere, when he actually had nowhere to be.
“Sorry,” George would say, “but I’m late. I really—I just have to go.”
Then he would sit on the steps of Butler library, not really watching the people and not reading or anything. If people noticed the lies, they didn’t say anything. He had expected they would ask where he was going or why he was going, but no one did.
They just said goodbye, they just watched him turn to leave, a little slouch in his step, which might well have been a compensation for his height.
He stopped shaving, but his beard was patchy at best and it itched. All the time, he wanted to scratch his face, but sitting on the steps of the library he didn’t do anything about it. Sometimes, he had his organic chemistry textbook in his lap, but he didn’t really open it. He just sort of put his fingers in between the pages, like he wanted to remember an important passage. He did this on the subway home too, and sometimes an old lady would say to him, “studying to be a doctor?”
Sometimes he would lie. He would say yes. He would say I go to Columbia Medical School. But that wasn’t true. Most of the time he would say, “not yet.” Maybe the woman would wish him luck, or maybe she would turn back to her mystery novel. He was the sort of boy older women liked to sit next to on the subway. They could loosen their hold on their bags when he was around—even now, when he was growing this patchy beard and looked kind of silly with his glasses sliding down his nose, maybe especially now.
And when he got home, to the house, with the yard being mowed by the kid next door, and his mom packing everything up in that way she had of never inhaling, but always exhaling—an endless sigh.
She said, “we’re moving to 168th and Morningside.” And his older brother, Bruce, didn’t say anything, except to remind everyone that that was more convenient for him, anyway, and he was only staying in the house now because of what had happened.
Their sister cried for a long time even though she already had her own husband and her own baby and her own home, which looked like an overgrown gingerbread house plopped in the middle of the suburbs and always smelled like too much rice—because that was all she knew how to make anyway. She sat in the blue living room in their childhood home sobbing, and her baby just sort of sat on the fresh wall-to-wall carpeting and then their mother just said, “okay now,” several times.
George didn’t say anything while this was happening. He just sat at the dining room table, with the brown boxes all around him, pretending to study organic chemistry. This bond works like this, he would say aloud and maybe Bruce would tell him to go get batteries from the grocery store, maybe Bruce would call him a pussy.
George met a girl in his summer course named Anna who liked to eat quiet foods during class—berries, soft carrots. Anna’s food never crunched or anything, and George was amazed by how she could take this quiet food out of her bag completely silently—no rustling, suddenly it was just there and she was eating it, still taking notes.
He wondered if Anna ate quiet food all the time, or just in class, and so he asked her if she wanted to go see *Henry IV, Part I* in Central Park and she finished her carrot and said, “okay, yeah, I guess.”
They had to skip class that day, and sit in the park starting very early in the morning because the tickets were free, but you had to wait a long time to get them. He brought a big yellow blanket from home and some bagels, and she got coffee because—she told him—she lived on the Upper West Side anyway, so it wasn’t that far for her really.
George tried to drink the coffee like he drank it all the time, but Anna could tell probably, he thought.
She smiled and asked him about his beard. When had he started growing it?
“Two months ago,” he said.
Anna asked him if he had flunked his regular organic chemistry class, the one he had been taking at school, and he said no that something had just gotten in the way, you see, and he hadn’t had a chance to finish it up.
Anna said that she had flunked hers, and her mother said that she should probably just be a nurse.
Then it started to drizzle a little bit and they moved farther under a tree, but still on the path, still in line, and George put his arm around her and kissed her for a little while and she said, “it tickles.”
After the play, when he was walking her back home, he asked her about the silent eating in class, and she said that in her house they always ate quiet foods, that if you dropped a fork while you were eating people all the way on East End probably heard it. Then she kissed him, and went upstairs to her apartment, and George noticed the doorman looking at him so he smiled and got on the subway, back home.
When he got home George wanted to tell his brother about the quiet eating girl, but his brother said, “I’m not Bruce. I’m Mr. Smith” just like he did when they were kids and their parents went out and maybe he asked Bruce to turn off the TV and Bruce would suddenly lower his voice and get all glassy-eyed and say that he wasn’t his brother at all.
“You’re an asshole, Bruce,” George said.
“I’m not Bruce,” his brother said again. “Bruce is in the closet. I stuffed Bruce in the closet.”
“You’re twenty-three fucking years old, Bruce.”
“Who’s Bruce?” he said, opening his eyes wide.
“You go to fucking Columbia Medical School, Bruce.”
“Bruce is dead,” he said. “I’m Mr. Smith.”
And for a second, in their silent house, with their mother pretending to be asleep in the room next door, George almost believed that his brother was suffocating in the closet.
“You still look like a pussy when you’re scared,” said Bruce, being Bruce again. And then, “so she only eats quiet foods, huh?”
“Not quiet. Silent.”
Bruce didn’t say anything.
“You know, you can’t say things like pussy when you’re a doctor,” George said.
“Just to you,” Bruce said, and then he got into bed and turned out the lights even though George hadn’t even taken his shoes off yet.
Later that summer, they moved to 168th street, to a two bedroom apartment with a living room and no dining room and maybe, if you stood in the kitchen at 7 a.m. you could get some natural light—that’s what the realtor who rented the apartment said, except she put it like “there’s such nice morning light, in the kitchen.”
But even after they had moved, sometimes without really noticing, George took the subway and then the train and then he was back in Long Island, in front of their house that wasn’t their house anymore. But it was never then that he thought about it, thought about how his father just collapsed about to give Mrs. Katzenstein a root canal, how he had been up at school and Bruce had called him real quiet and said that he should come home fast, just take the train.
“What?” George had said, holding the payphone really close to his ear in the hallway, with his roommate behind him in line to call his mother about wiring him some more money. And George had told his roommate to shut up already, he was trying to listen but his brother was uncharacteristically quiet and just said that he should, he should take the train, which—of course—he did.
It wasn’t then, standing in front of the house that wasn’t his, that had been sold to an Indian family who were making spicy smelling foods, that George thought about how the payphone had felt kind of soft in his hand, or about how his sister was probably still crying all the time in her gingerbread house, trying to learn to cook something that wasn’t rice.
It was the moment when he told people that he had to go, that he had somewhere to be. It was then that he couldn’t help but think, or maybe he left because he was already thinking.
He thought about his mother sitting in the kitchen light, searching *The New York Times* for a new place to be a dental assistant. He thought about how she could think about so many things at once, how she could turn away real quiet and make these lists in her novels every night before she went to bed.
*One: unpack boxes. Two: buy new dress for interview. Three: shovel snow,* and then she crossed that one out because it wasn’t winter and they didn’t have a driveway anymore.
George didn’t know about the novel lists until he and Bruce were unpacking boxes, and he was flipping through his mother’s copy of *The Idiot *and he found one.
*One: update address book. Two: file insurance claim. Three: pluck eyebrows.*
“Isn’t it weird the way she writes out the numbers?” George said.
Bruce just said that their mom was like that, but George opened up all the novels and saw that they each had lists in them.
“Isn’t it weird that there aren’t any dates? That she doesn’t date them?” George said.
“Yeah,” said Bruce. “That’s definitely the thing that’s weird about this.” And there were so many “ths” in his mouth that he kind of stuttered when he said it.
“Do you think,” asked George, more quiet than usual, “do you think she would make the list before or after she and dad…before or after they’d…you know?”
George thought that Bruce might punch him or call him a pussy, but instead he said: “After. Definitely after.”
But really, what George thought about, what he was always thinking about, even as he was watching Anna eat her quiet foods in class, was Mrs. Katzenstein. Mrs. Katezenstein just waiting to have a root canal in that big white office chair, with the smell of dentist office all around her, and the quiet hum of the waiting room right outside the door, and his mom typing up bills in the next room, and that extra silence of the now-empty house which cradled the office, where maybe, five or six years ago, you would’ve heard Bruce and George fighting about who should take the trash out downstairs.
Mrs. Katzenstein didn’t walk by their house now, ever. But if she did she might’ve seen George standing there, smelling the Indian family’s dinner. Mrs. Katzenstein might’ve called out. She might’ve said: George! George!
This won’t hurt Mrs. Katzenstein, his father probably said, right before he died. Trust me, Mrs. Katzenstein. You won’t feel a thing.
Poetry • Winter 2019 - Double
In my dream the dead have arrived
as escorts. We travel
past cold hills and wolves
wild in a deadlocked field. A corporation
of stars cracks overhead. I lean
my hand where the hunting dogs
chase the rabbit, and they tell me
constellation means assembled
for life. Then they lend me
a shovel and dissolve into night.
There is no other way back. I dig
through snow until the cold metal strikes.
2026